WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A ban on Iraqi political figures from taking part in March elections is payback by certain groups who did poorly in provincial elections, a scholar suggests.
Iraq's Justice and Accountability Commission, a body tasked with vetting ties to the deposed Baath Party, disqualified hundreds of candidates from taking part in March parliamentary elections.
Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and author of the influential Web site historiae.org, told the Council on Foreign Relations the decision is troubling for its wantonness.
"The problem with these exclusions is not that they hit a particular group, but that they hit individuals in a very arbitrary fashion," he said. "There seems to be no firm legal basis for what is being done."
Iraq's president and two vice presidents agreed, saying they would take the issue before a federal court.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Iraq last week in an effort to calm the row over the controversial election decision. He told Iraqi lawmakers that while Washington backed any effort to keep Saddam loyalists out of office, the ban was largely a matter of internal affairs.
Visser said Washington should be more engaged than that, noting the exclusions, mostly Sunni, may be a sign of a return to sectarian politics in Iraq.
"This is the comeback strategy of those forces that lost in the last local elections in 2009," he said.
