As published for The Washington Post on March 7th, 2010:

I still remember shuttling all night between my office at the National Security Council and the State Department’s Election Watch Task Force. It was Jan. 30, 2005, Iraq was holding its first meaningful elections in decades, and I was supposed to brief President George W. Bush in a few hours. When morning came, I made my way to the library in his residence and described to the president how our early anxieties in watching then-Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar cast his ballot in an eerily empty Baghdad polling booth had transformed into exhilaration as more and more Iraqis poured onto the streets and into the voting stations.

The exhilaration soon gave way to exasperation. Few of us had anticipated how protracted and fractious the post-election process of forming an Iraqi government would be. With both that vote and the one that followed in December of that year, an immediate lull in violence gave way to intense wrangling between and within parties over the nature and composition of the government. In 2006, the political vacuum produced a security vacuum, and when the new government was sworn in, it faced a situation that was significantly more violent and volatile than before.

Iraq is on much sounder footing today than it was in 2005 or 2006. Yet once again, after Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the country is probably in store for long negotiations over who will share power in the new government — a battle that could strain Iraq’s fledgling political institutions and complicate the planned drawdown of U.S. forces. Although forming a government is an Iraqi affair, the United States has clear interests in the character of that government. It will preside over the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011 and determine the nature of the bilateral relationship in the years ahead. And, for better or worse, the new government may have to navigate Iraq’s role in a possible confrontation between the international community and its neighbor Iran.

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