U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael McKinney, 2nd Infantry Brigade, 8th Infantry Regiment, and an Iraqi soldier from the 8th Iraqi Army, oversee a group of applicants waiting to register for the Sons of Iraq in Diwaniyah, Iraq, Oct. 25, 2008. U.S. forces support the Iraqi Army as they continue to move towards conducting operations without U.S. support. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Eric Harris

It’s a tense time in Iraq right now: We’re approaching the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, while a week from Sunday, Iraqis will head to the polls for a parliamentary election that may show exactly what kind of democracy America is leaving behind.

The run-up to the country’s second democratic national election has been marked by political tussling: First, the election itself was pushed back by several months. Then, a political battle between Iraq’s two vice presidents and the disqualification of more than 500 parliamentary candidates on the grounds that they had links to Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Ba’ath Party re-ignited the country’s long simmering sectarian tensions.

Violence in Iraq has sharply increased over the past few months, with large-scale bombings, a smattering of kidnappings, and at least one assassination, The New York Times reported. At the same time, America has steadily withdrawn its troops, with expectations to be out altogether by the end of 2011, and American attention has been increasingly occupied by Afghanistan and Iran.

So where does that leave Iraq? The answer is, we don’t know.

Reuters, in an analysis piece published this morning, wrote the upcoming election could set Iraq “on a path to peace and prosperity or bring back the bloody sectarian chaos of the years that followed the U.S. invasion of 2003.” US and UN officials hope that the election process will help re-integrate the Sunni Muslims back into the political process, while other observers and Iraqis themselves are praying for a fair and credible election, whatever the outcome. Reuters also pointed out that whoever wins this election will be in power when the last American soldier leaves – and in control of some serious oil wealth.

Thomas Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a reported who covered the Iraq War for The Washington Post, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times yesterday that continued US pull out of the country would be disastrous and most certainly lead to civil war. “Once again, the United States would be rushing toward failure in Iraq, as it did so often under the Bush administration, trying to pass responsibility to Iraqi officials and institutions before they are ready for the task,” he wrote. At the same time, extending the US presence in Iraq would be “even more politically controversial” in Iraq, meaning that US and Iraqi leaders must tread lightly.

In the US, the outcome of the Iraqi election will be a kind of make-or-break moment for US President Barack Obama – one among a host of make-or-break moments for the first-term president – Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post wrote Monday. The next six months in Iraq will determine whether the US has succeeded not only in bringing a functioning democracy to Iraq, but also whether it’s one friendly to America – and whether, Diehl said, “Washington will awaken to an Iraq that once again has become an endless nightmare.”

Thomas Freidman, columnist for The New York Times, also weighed in on Iraq yesterday, summed up the uncertainty that most observers feel: “Will Iraq’s new politics triumph over its cultural divides, or will its cultural/sectarian divides sink its fledgling democracy? We still don’t know.”