A Government Only A Green Could Love

The UN's meddling in Iraq could still screw things up, says this OpinionJournal piece this morning.

It's about the plan the UN has put forth for the upcoming Iraqi elections - a system that resembles the Green Party's pet plan for proportional elections:

In this system, voters choose not among individual candidates but among parties that are awarded a share of legislative seats based on their percentage of the vote. Proponents say the system better allows all significant voices to be heard. But even in the best of cases--Italy over much of the past 50 years--proportional systems tend to produce unstable governments easily paralyzed by the little parties they have to cobble into a majority coalition. Would-be candidates are beholden to party bosses who determine their place on the electoral list and thus their chances of success.

In Iraq especially, with its many ethnic divisions, the risks of such a system are huge. As much as possible we should be encouraging Iraqis to think of themselves as Iraqis rather than as Kurds or Arabs, Shiites or Sunnis. First-past-the-post elections in Iraqi neighborhoods, many of which are multi-ethnic, would help accomplish this. Where local elections have been held thus far in Iraq, voters have chosen pragmatic and secular figures rather than religious or ethnic extremists.

So why this unproven, quagmire-prone system?

A big part of the motivation appears to be the dogmatic desire of the U.N. and State Department to ensure that at least 25% of Iraqi legislators are women, which is a goal but not a requirement of Iraq's interim constitution. You can rig a party-list election to ensure such an outcome, and Ms. Perelli wants to mandate that every third candidate be a woman. She couldn't do that with constituencies.

We'll be following this, hoping that someone comes to their senses.

Read the whole thing, natch.

Posted by Mitch at June 10, 2004 08:05 AM