While the Tigris River will greet the new day just as it always does Jan. 30, Iraqi citizens will vote in a democratic election for the first time in the nation's history.
Iraq's voting populace will cast its ballots to determine a 275-member Transitional National Assembly from several hundred individuals and 120 parties, each with a slate of candidates. The assembly must then elect a state president and draft a constitution by mid-2005.
Sunni Arabs, an estimated 20 percent of Iraq's roughly 26 million people, have long ruled over Iraq's Shi'ite Arab majority.
\What you have historically is an area-it wasn't a country before the 1920s-under Ottoman Turkish rule, run largely by the Sunni minority for the Ottomans,"" said David Morgan, UW-Madison professor of history and religious studies.
The Sunnis remained in power during a British occupation following World War II and enjoyed national authority and control through Saddam Hussein's tenure as dictator, Morgan said. In contrast, millions of Iraqi Kurds have secured relative autonomy in the northern portion of the country.
""More than half of [Iraq's] population are Shi'ite Arabs who have been always excluded from power,"" Morgan said. ""That is clearly going to change.""
Escalating violence and deadly terrorist strikes have hindered the political process. In December 2004, a mortar attack destroyed an election office north of Baghdad, killing two and injuring eight. Matthew Baum, UCLA assistant professor of political science, described the tremendous difficulty in introducing a democratic election.
""A lot of the poll workers have been intimidated into resigning; they're having trouble finding people to show up to man the polls in a lot of places,"" Baum said.
Samer S. Shehata, professor of political science at Georgetown University's Center of Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), offered harsh criticism of both election security and of the election's validity.
""Candidates are afraid to list their names-there hasn't been campaigning, there hasn't been the articulation of programs,"" Shehata said. ""For the most part, we have something quite bad happening, which is exacerbating the sectarian tensions.""
Perhaps most critical to the election's perceived legitimacy will be the Sunni turnout. With a Shi'ite victory a foregone conclusion, many religious leaders have demanded a national boycott. Shehata characterized the Sunnis as furious over American soldiers' counter-insurgency policies and their actions in Fallujah.
""To call these elections democratic, or a watershed, I think misses the fundamental reality that Iraqis experience daily, which is absence of security, absence of law and order, a state that can't secure the country, staff and fuel shortages, electricity which is lower now than it was three or four months ago, lack of basic services and incredible unemployment,"" Shehata said.
CCAS economics Professor Tarik Yousef of Georgetown University emphasized basic security must be enforced before Iraqis can commence more ambitious projects, such as the creation of domestic financial markets. Yousef added the eventual transformation to a market economy will be arduous, as the Hussein administration's political agenda, not its economic policy, failed the Iraqi people.
""In Iraq, the state never lost the expectation that it would take care of certain things for the Iraqi system, so trying to impose a new system in a place where the old system was not really discredited may be a problem in the future,"" Yousef said.
Morgan cautioned analysis of election success is likely premature.
""A friend of mine, who was in the Coalition Provisional Authority for some months last year in Baghdad, said to me that he thought it was still too soon to be optimistic, but also too soon to be pessimistic; we just don't know,"" Morgan said.