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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. During 2004–5, he served on the Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on United States Policy Toward Arab Reform. His most recent book is “Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.” This interview was conducted Dec. 21.

View of Thursday’s election

It isn’t clear how free and fair this election was. There are many allegations of vote fraud that have to be investigated. More importantly, there is mounting evidence that the climate included very substantial intimidation, even violence, by militias, especially the militias associated with the United Iraq Alliance [the ticket of the Shiite religious parties that appears to have won a big victory, based on preliminary results. The two big Shiite militias, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, are associated with political groups connected to the UIA.]

So you have to be cautious in calling this a democratic election, when there were such possibly serious violations of basic democratic practices.

But at the same time, even if the results are imperfect, it’s hard to maintain that the outcome is a gross distortion of the popular will. It appears that the results reflect broadly what Iraqis want, and now we’re going to have to deal with it. I find this to be a deeply depressing outcome.

What’s so depressing about it?

There are two things that worry me deeply, and they’re related.

First, it appears that the vast majority of Iraqis have voted along ethnic and sectarian lines -- Shia voting for Shia, Sunnis for Sunnis, and Kurds for Kurds. And let’s face it, they did have another choice, which was the Allawi ticket. . [Iyad Allawi, formerly acting prime minister and considered Washington’s favorite candidate, led the Iraqi National List, the strongest secular ticket that combined candidates from all the major population groups. Many American analysts believed he would get up to 20 percent of the vote and possibly become prime minister in the next government. It now appears he might get less than 10 percent.]

I don’t suggest that Allawi is really much of a liberal, deeply committed to human rights or constitutionalism. But his list did become the rallying point for a secular, liberal, pan-sectarian vision of Iraq, based on a national Iraqi identity.

That list was out there as an option. No one can say it wasn’t known to the Iraqi people. It was lavishly funded. It had the assistance of skillful ad-makers and campaign consultants. His posters may have been torn down. Some of his candidates may have been assaulted or even assassinated. But his television ads were widely broadcast, and still the Iraqi people rejected that choice and fell back on their ethnic and sectarian identities. This undermines the hope that some kind of Iraqi identity can come to the forefront and make it possible for people from different ethnic and religious groups to come together and compromise their differences.

And down the road it raises the question of whether Iraq really is a nation, in the sense of a modern nation-state in which people share some kind of national identity.

The second most troubling thing is the evidence of the very extensive use of violence, the misuse of police power, the use of militia members acting under police power to intimidate their political opponents.

The fact that the parties that have won this election engaged in those kinds of tactics naturally raises serious doubts about whether a government shaped by religious fascists like Moqtada al-Sadr and theocrats like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim can govern in a way that can be called a democracy, even if they do win an election.

Democracy is about more than majority rule through the ballot box. It’s also about the rule of law and the protection of minority rights and human rights. I don’t see much hope right now that a government led by these sorts of people is going to respect those other minimum requirements of democracy.

I see Moqtada al-Sadr [the radical cleric and militia leader whose followers made up one of the pillars of the UIA’s support] as an extreme Islamist authoritarian. His goal is a harsh, puritanical Islamic state, akin to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in which he will be the real power behind elective office. Where his movement has taken power in the Shiite south, we have seen Taliban-style violations of the rights of women, religious minorities, and even Muslims who do not subscribe to his extremist vision.

It’s troubling to think that the U.S. intervention in Iraq could lead to the rise of a Shiite theocracy, led by parties spawned in Iran, some of them virulently anti-American, representing views that violate basic principles of human rights. How are we going to square that with the loss of over 2,000 U.S. troops?

What happens next

The formation of the government and the revision of the constitution. If indeed the UIA has won as convincingly as they seem to have, with perhaps 45 percent of the seats, they are going to be in the driver’s seat in forming a government and it’s going to be extremely difficult to convince them to back off from the victory that they already won in August and in October over the Constitution.