Word: iraq
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...Iraq...
Baqubah, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, is a largely colorless place except for the winter orange harvest and the hundreds of campaign posters that line its streets. But at least the sectarian battles between Sunnis and Shi'ites that once raged through the city are now confined mostly to the ballot box as Baqubah, along with the rest of Iraq, prepares for national parliamentary elections on March 7. Inside the fortified government headquarters, Diyala's governor, Abdul-Nasser al-Mahdawi, is relatively optimistic that the elections - the fifth poll since the U.S. brought democracy to Iraq - will...
Democracy is messy everywhere. In Iraq, it is both messy and dangerous. The country has now had more practice at choosing its own leaders in relatively open elections than perhaps any Middle Eastern nation besides Israel and Lebanon. In 2003, many U.S. architects of the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein hoped the events would be followed by a democratic ripple effect throughout the region. That has not yet happened. The politicians who came to power after the country's first parliamentary election five years ago have been unable to resolve core issues - from deciding...
...Iraq has another chance. The surge of American military forces in 2007 bought time for Iraq's leaders to work out their problems. The U.S. is betting that they can. The Status of Forces Agreement worked out between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government holds that the U.S. must withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by the end of August and the remaining 50,000 support troops by the end of 2011. The Obama Administration has stuck to the timetable. With one eye on a developing political maturity in Iraq, Vice President Joe Biden has predicted that Iraq could...
...they have joined in loose multiethnic and multisectarian coalitions. "Obviously there are still going to be candidates who just parrot what their leader says, but that's not going to be as effective this time," says an official with a U.S.-funded NGO that works on democracy training. Iraq's political class, she says, is learning that "they have to let the public define the issues, rather than defining the issues for them." (See pictures of Iraq's revival...