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THE ROVING EYE
What's
behind the new Iraq
By Pepe
Escobar
It took more than nine weeks,
fiery haggling and backroom deals for Iraq's
politicians to compose a new government.
The president is Kurdish
warlord Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, who enjoys close ties with both
Washington and Tehran. The two vice presidents
are: Adel Abdel Mahdi of the United Iraqi Alliance
(UIA), a senior Shi'ite leader of the Supreme
Council of Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq and
the interim 
finance
minister, and a former Maoist turned free-marketer
who last December promised in Washington to
privatize the Iraqi oil industry; and the previous
president, Ghazi al-Yawer, a former exile and
influential Sunni sheikh of the Sammar tribe.
Talabani is finally set to appoint Da'wa Party
senior leader Ibrahim Jaafari of the UIA as prime
minister.
It's
about time. Iraqis have grown
increasingly exasperated with the political haggling
since the elections on January 30 - on the
lines of "how could we have elected those people?"
It got so bad that the four grand ayatollahs
in the now de facto shadow capital Najaf
were about to call a massive street protest to
bring the politicians to their senses. This was compounded
by the fact that many Iraqis repudiate political
life reduced to religious sectarianism, a
legacy of the United States' Coalition Provisional
Authority, which imposed the current institutional
arrangement.
It's emerging that the real
meaty matters in Iraq - federalism, who gets
oil-rich Kirkuk, and, crucially, what happens to
the oil industry overall - will be settled by the
constituent assembly. But two developments are
ominous. The attribution of ministries for the
"new" government once again will be sectarian. And
every faction will remain armed to their teeth.
The Kurds keep their independent peshmerga
militia, and financed by Baghdad. The SCIRI keeps
its Badr Brigades. The Da'wa Party also keeps its
own militia. None of these will answer to Baghdad
- which mobilizes its own, US-trained Iraqi
security forces. Cynically, one might add that
outside the political process, the Sunni
resistance will also keep its thousands of
fighters.
Lebanonization?
It's too
soon to perceive the substantial details of the
Shi'ite-Kurd deal - between them they hold more
than two-thirds of the 275 seats in parliament.
But what's happened since January 30 is definitely
not a good omen.
Among the 275
parliamentary players involved in the nine-week
political football, there were only 17 Sunni Arabs,
as the majority of Sunni Arabs boycotted the
elections. Clearly, these Sunnis are unlikely to
be representative of the Sunni Arabs, who make up
20% of the population. The crucial Sunni Arab
grievance is that because they are a demographic
minority - although nobody really knows for sure,
there is no census and there may be more Sunni
Arabs than Kurds - this does not mean they have to
accept their political marginalization as a
fait accompli. The fact that Sunni Arabs
involved in the political process are viewed by
many Sunni Arabs as illegitimate explains why
former president Yawer didn't want to become
parliamentary Speaker.
Indeed, the manner
in which the new Sunni Arab parliament Speaker,
Hajim al-Hasani, was picked upset the Sunnis. Of
the 17 Sunnis in parliament, three contested the
elections on the UIA list - so they were
unacceptable to the Sunnis themselves. Of the
remaining 14, 12 were parliamentarians under
Saddam Hussein or had some kind of Ba'athist
credentials, so they were unacceptable to the
Shi'ites and the Kurds.
So there were only
two Sunnis with standing: Yawer and Hasani. Both
are non-Ba'athist former exiles. Hasani, a native
of Kirkuk and a former member of the Iraqi Islamic
Party, a successor of the Iraqi Muslim
Brotherhood, studied and lived for years in the
US. And that goes to the heart of why he was not
the Sunni first choice for Speaker: he had been an
exile for too long; and to make matters worse,
during the leveling of Fallujah - when he was one
of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's ministers - he
refused to resign, unlike the leader of the Iraqi
Islamic Party, Muhsin Abdul Hamid (the party later
expelled Hasani).
So why was he elected
Speaker? Because he's one of only two Sunnis who
did not contest the elections for the UIA who is
acceptable to the Shi'ites; the other, Yawer,
wisely refused the hot potato.
The
ramifications are ominous. Shi'ites understandably
would be resentful of any Sunnis who were
connected to the Ba'ath Party. Yet Iraqis know
that during Saddam's era this was the only way to
get things done, and in many cases survive with
some dignity. To make matters worse, the new
deputy Speaker, Hussein Shahristani, an engineer
very close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has
labeled 12 of the 17 Sunni parliamentarians as
Ba'athists. So the Shi'ites are caught in a
see-saw of wanting Sunni Arabs to become involved
in the political process - with the objective of
weakening the guerrilla war - just as they are
falling over themselves to alienate them.
Most Sunni Arabs can be expected to view
the story as one of falling from total control of
government and society in Iraq to the point of
being represented in a dodgy parliament by a
former exile with negligible local support and
connections and who was discarded by his own
political party. To compound the climate of
untrustworthiness, the Kurds suspect Hasani of
being a fundamentalist Sunni Arab from Kirkuk.
If the Sunni Arabs inside the political
process are not recognized as legitimate, the ones
who are remain outside the process: the
Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), under its
leader Harith al-Dari, and what we have described
as the Sinn Fein strand of the Sunni Arab
resistance. The minority secular Sunni Arabs,
inside the political process, are concerned that
the AMS may be configuring itself as a religious,
pro-resistance Sunni counterpower: they fear this
would represent a certified Lebanonization of
Iraq. But the fact is the AMS has been cleverly
filling a Sunni political vacuum: it has even
admitted publicly it would condemn the resistance
in Islamic terms, as long as the new Iraqi
government came up with a definitive timetable for
a complete US military withdrawal. You can't get
more popular than that in Iraq. The AMS already
makes a clear distinction between "noble"
guerrillas - who attack the occupying forces - and
the murderers who attack Iraqi civilians.
The big question now is how the Shi'ites
and Kurds will deal with marginalized Sunni Arabs
- paying close attention to their political
grievances or clobbering them with
peshmergas, Badr Brigades and Iraqi
security forces. It's politics or civil war.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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