John Batchel here, a conversation with Hussain Abdulazane of the Foundation for Dementza and Democracy,

about the Iraqi version of democracy. It's fascinating. A prime minister must be Shia,

the speaker must be Sunni, and the president must be Kurdish. And they each have their own version of choosing

and everybody else must support you. Hussein explains it much better than I can. I get a little

lost. My scorecards marked up, but it's a rocky democracy all these years later after the

catastrophe of Saddam Hussein and the American occupation, here's the saying.

More of this tonight.

So the way the Iraqi electoral politics have been designed since the downfall of Sudan is that you have a president who's Kurdish, a speaker of the House, who's Sunni,

and a prime minister who's Shia. And before these guys come to parliament to win the votes of

everybody else, they have to play what you can call a primary amongst themselves. So my piece

in the national interest is about the Shia primary,

how the Shia selected their own prime minister. Now once he's selected, the non-Shiah blocks also

support him because if they don't, it'll be seen as intervention in Shia affairs. So among