Iraq's election results confirm the expected victory of Shia parties, the proportional participation of Sunnis, a reduced but nonetheless representative Kurdish group, a weaker secular one and a scattering of independent and minor parties.
The Shia parties lack an overall majority and have agreed to pursue negotiations on a coalition government. This will be a difficult task. And it is likely to be an impossible one if there is no parallel agreement to withdraw the coalition troops led by the United States, whose continuing presence will stoke military resistance to whatever new government finally emerges.
Iraq desperately needs to find a way to establish genuine self-government over the coming year. These election results can provide a basis for that, given the willingness of the Sunni parties to negotiate. They have agreed to do so despite the continuing military resistance backed by many of their supporters. This is intended to exert pressure on foreign troops to withdraw, as many of the coalition states are now doing. Several recent reports indicate that the resistance is gaining in intensity, not diminishing. Most Iraqis want foreign troops to go, as do the citizens of nearly all the states involved in the occupying coalition.
This does not mean that this will happen this year. There is a contradiction in the Bush administration's policy between its rhetoric in favour of Iraqi democratic self-rule and its unwillingness to withdraw troops under military pressure. The geopolitical and energy resource arguments in favour of the war require a continuing US presence in Iraq. This is reinforced by the emerging crisis over Iran's nuclear programme. It is hardly likely that the US would pull out just as a Shia-dominated government with many links to Iran assumes power in Iraq. But that is the political logic of this situation. It is a dangerous one, the outcome of which will probably be resolved as much by public opinion in the US, Britain and other members of the coalition as in Iraq itself. Already, subordinate players, such as the Italians, have clearly indicated that they intend to pull out later this year.
The latest statement by Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, plays cleverly into this political game. He offers a truce in his terrorist campaign against the US in return for a military withdrawal from Iraq, noticing the clear shift against the war in US public opinion. It is a nightmare scenario for Mr Bush, who stands firm on defeating terrorism rather than making a truce with it. It will take a clear demand by Iraqi leaders as well as by leaders of US public opinion for a timetable to withdraw if the Bush administration's policy is to be shifted.