This question, and many more, must be decided before Iraqis head to the polls at the end of January. Reuters has the story:

Iraq's top Sunni Muslim party is withdrawing from Jan. 30 elections, saying persistent violence would keep people from voting in the Sunni north and west.

"We are withdrawing," Mohsen Abdel Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, told a news conference on Monday.

"We are not calling for a boycott but we said we would take part only if certain conditions had been met and they have not."

If the Sunnis indeed choose not to participate in the elctions -- or if they lose -- it appears that the Bush administration has developed a fail-safe solution. The New York Times's Steven R. Weisman reports:

The Bush administration is talking to Iraqi leaders about guaranteeing Sunni Arabs a certain number of ministries or high-level jobs in the future Iraqi government if, as is widely predicted, Sunni candidates fail to do well in Iraq's elections.

An even more radical step, one that a Western diplomat said was raised already with an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, is the possibility of adding some of the top vote-getters among the Sunni candidates to the 275-member legislature, even if they lose to non-Sunni candidates.

Leave it to the Bushies to devise a "democratic" system in which one party is ensured of seats regardless of the number of votes it receives. It is clearly imperative to the success of the Iraqi Democracy to have all groups involved in the process; I'm just not sure that assuring one party of seats -- even if it doesn't participate in the election -- is the best way to create a fair and functioning Democracy.