In Kirkuk, you have a combination of Turks, Turkmen, Kurds, and Arabs, among whom are lots of recent migrants who have been displaced from their traditional homes (these are apparently mostly Arabs who were resettled there during the Hussein regime, or Kurds who have migrated there since the end of the Husseing regime, if you want to believe the Turkish government on the subject of Kurds). Throw in a lot of oil and a lot of weapons with the ethnic and political tensions, and you have a pretty volatile mix.
I can certainly understand the concern over the potential for post-election violence, with various groups complaining that the election was “stolen” from them. So whose interests are served by having an election now, and whose are not? Is an election in an enviroment this unstable likely to be a case of one step forward, two steps back?
In any case, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the charade in Iraq is a “free election.” It’s just a dog-and-pony show for the Bush Administration, so they have something to wave as justification for the Damn Fool War™.
In Iraq, we are seeing the exit plan, note we are not taking the oil fields as I wished, but are helping the Iraqis form a new government. One where womens’ rights can evolve, one where gays may one day get married (or civil unionized), where a ordanary citizen can go to the Presidents office and pound his fist and state, Mr President, I don’t like how George W. Bush is running his country.
By “free election,” I mean only in the sense that at least in theory, any adult citizen can vote for any of a wide variety of candidates. I certainly know that the Iraqi elections will be problematic at best; in fact, one of my best friends is working as a poll worker for the Out of Country Voting for Iraqis here in the Midwest.
Howver, speaking as someone who is certainly no fan of the current U.S. administration, and who arrived at her polling place on Election Day to discover that her change of voter registration had been conveniently “lost,” I am not talking about U.S. electoral politics, and you know it. I was hoping for something a little more thoughtful, not to mention related to the matter at hand. So please knock off the stupid partisan squabbling.
In an attempt to actually answer the OP rather than engage in partisan bickering like everybody else here, there is a school of thought which says that elections in deeply divided (particularly among ethnic or religious lines) societies only serve to polarise those societies further. See Roland Paris’s “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism”.
I would say that there are 2 situations where it might be not desirable, the 1st would when the population are totally not knoweagable about the political happenings, the 2nd, whihc is fixable, is when there is inbread hatred between major groups. A fix might involve making sure each group has a equal political say (and able to veto eachother)