Pending a Vote, Some Iraqis Press for a Larger Governing Council. Perhaps I'm just overly cynical, but this seems like a fairly transparent attempt to dilute the influence of the originally appointed council with people aligned with special interests. I would be astonished if Iraq ends up with a truely representative government from this process, but who knows? It seems to me that the only representative government that would truely work in such a sharply divided population would have to rely on tribal traditions. Perhaps granting every citizen some arbitrary number of "votes" per year, which they pass on to their representatives, who spend them or hoard them until just the right moment would allow even the smallest minority opinion to (eventually) have its way.