The United Nations' Unfitness

While the United States is attempting to cobble together a stable government in Iraq, the United Nations is attempting some rather silly social engineering almost guaranteed to bring about its collapse.

The United Nations is proposing a "proportional" democracy.

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.

By contrast, Ms. Perelli's nationwide proportional system will encourage voters and parties to separate themselves along sectarian lines. What's more, where constituency systems tend toward centrist politics as candidates seek a majority, proportional systems empower extremists who could never win outright in any single area but who can garner a significant minority of the vote. Look for the mad Shiite Muqtada al-Sadr, for one, to get elected under these rules.

Furthermore, the UN wants to force a gender quota system upon Iraq, rather as Democrats do for their conventions.

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.

It seems to us that advocates for Iraqi women would be better advised to concentrate on creating a stable democracy first. A 25% showing for Iraqi women in the first election isn't going to matter much if an unstable system then gives way to fundamentalist takeover or civil war.