DAMASCUS - In many ways, Iraq has not
changed since the days of King Faisal I, the
founder of modern Iraq. Power is still
decentralized, tribalism is high and many Iraqis
still have dominating sub-national allegiances,
driven by Shi'ite, Sunni or Kurdish nationalism.
Often, these loyalties surpass their commitments
to Iraqi nationalism.
In 1933, Faisal
wrote a letter to a friend complaining about the
country he had ruled since
1921:
In my belief, there is no Iraqi
nation as yet, but there are groups of people
without any idea of nationhood and patriotism or
sense of belonging and allegiance to the
homeland. These groups have embraced tribal
traditions and religious superstitions, and they
have nothing to cement them together. They
listen to the worse of rumors and like anarchy.
This being the case, we want to form a nation
from these groups to train them and educate
them. This is the nation that I decided to take
responsibility to build.
These
people, who Faisal says "have nothing to cement
them together", are vigorously competing for
leadership of the new Iraq in Thursday's
elections. The strongest names are the Shi'ite
cleric Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)
and former prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular
US-backed politician who leads a broad
multi-ethnic coalition of Shi'ites, Sunnis and
Kurds.
Surprisingly, the elections have
been greatly neglected in the international media
and particularly in the Arab press. One reason is
that too many regional issues are competing for
headlines, such as the new Mehlis report that was
delivered to the United Nations on December 11,
about the assassination of Lebanon's former prime
minister Rafik Hariri, and the murder of Lebanese
journalist and member of parliament Gibran Tueni
on December 12.
Another reason for
ignoring the elections is that despite Arab
rhetoric of wanting a healthy Iraq, many in the
Arab World do not want to see Iraq heal its wounds
because this would mean that the Americans were
succeeding in bringing democracy to Baghdad. They
would rather see President George W Bush defeated
than acknowledge that Iraq had improved from where
it stood under Saddam Hussein's brutal
dictatorship.
A third reason is that
leaders in the Arab world do not want the Iraqi
elections to inspire their own people into
demanding similar democracy. Democracy, after all,
is contagious. Even though civilized life has
almost collapsed in Iraq, its democracy is
flourishing, and the elections will take place as
planned. This despite Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the
Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda describing them as
"Satanic" and a "violation of the legitimate
policy approved by God".
The polls differ
from the ones of January for a variety of reasons.
One is that the Sunnis, who boycotted those, will
participate. Their participation comes as their
former leader, Saddam Hussein, stands trial in
Baghdad. One of the Sunni candidates, Mezher
al-Dulaimi, was gunned down in Ramadi, west of
Baghdad, while filing his car at a gas station on
December 13.
Another reason why the
elections are significant is that this time the
government will not be an interim one, as was the
case in July 2004 and January, but rather, a
constitutional one with a four-year mandate. It
will decide on the timetable for foreign troops to
remain in Iraq.
And one important
difference in this election is that Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who backed Hakim and
Ibrahim Jaafari in January, doing wonders for
their votes, has refused to endorse any single
list and kept a clear distance in the runup to the
voting. This is a clear setback to Hakim and makes
room for other strong candidates, like Allawi, to
win new votes.
Betting on Allawi The best possible bet for the Iraqis today is
the secular former premier Allawi. At 60 years of
age, the former Ba'athist is a strong man who has
promised to bring order to his chaotic war-torn
country. He boasts of having worked against
Saddam's dictatorship for 33 years and suffered an
assassination attempt while studying in London in
the 1970s.
Allawi has the money, comes
from a prominent Shi'ite family, boasts a history
of political activism along with being a one-time
member of the exiled Iraqi opposition, and is well
connected in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Great Britain
and the US. His drawbacks are that he is a former
Ba'athist, accused of being a one-time Saddam spy
in Europe, and his having received funds from
British and American intelligence in the 1980s and
1990s.
He is also accused of delivering
false information about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction program in 2002, which was used by the
White House to justify the invasion of 2003.
On becoming premier in July 2004,
according to some reports, he visited a police
station in Baghdad and shot five Iraqis accused of
troublemaking and killing fellow Iraqis. Allawi's
office dismissed the allegations as "rumors
instigated by enemies of the interim government".
Nevertheless, the story sent a message that he was
a strongman. And at this stage, Iraq cannot afford
democrats; it needs a strongman to pull it
together.
During his tenure in power,
Allawi authorized the bombardment of Iraqi cities
to break the insurgency, an act that was greatly
unpopular and led to his ousting from the
premiership in early 2005. Since then, however,
Iraqis have reasoned that perhaps Allawi's methods
were not so bad after all, since his successor,
Jaafari, has been unable to bring any law and
order to the streets of Iraq. Zarqawi is stronger
today than ever. Security might have been zero
under Allawi, but it is below zero under Jaafari.
Allawi stands as the only man who can
reduce, if not eliminate, the raging insurgency.
He has promised to restore secularism once enjoyed
by the Iraqis under the Ba'athists and which has
largely evaporated since the clerics rose to power
in 2003. He is well connected to prominent Iraqi
Sunnis and is campaigning on a joint slate with
Sunni notables like Adnan al-Pachachi, an
ex-minister of foreign affairs. Together, the two
men, helped by Sunni clerics, can bring order to
the so-called Sunni triangle.
Also, he can
elicit support from Iraq's neighbors because his
ascent would greatly be welcomed by countries like
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. He has the power
to fight Islamic fundamentalists, much to the
pleasure of Riyadh, Amman and Damascus, and would
put an end to the meddling of Iranian politicians
in Iraqi affairs, which would be greatly welcomed
by Saudi King Abdullah, the traditional opponent
of Iran.
Syria, the country accused of
supporting the insurgency, would also welcome
Allawi's return as prime minister due to his
secularism, strength and pledge to fight the
Islamists. Allawi has also refused the carving up
of Iraq on sectarian grounds and giving an
autonomous mini-state to the Shi'ites in the
south. It places him at odds with clerics like
Sistani and Hakim, but puts him on favorable terms
with the Sunnis, the secularists, moderate Shiites
and the Kurds.
It also makes him favored
(even if only temporarily) by the young Shi'ite
rebel, Muqtada al-Sadr, who dreads a Shi'ite state
in Iraq, claiming that this would ruin and weaken
the country. This would tap support for him with
the Shi'ite poor, who are loyal to Muqtada, as
opposed to the rich, who are allied to Hakim and
Sistani. The monarchists, who long to restore the
Iraqi throne, would also welcome him for his
pro-Western views.
Allawi is also well
connected to the Kurds and a good friend and ally
of current President Jalal Talabani. In addition,
Allawi appreciates Iraq's current woes, promising
to bring security, fight unemployment (currently
estimated at a staggering 70%), and improve
day-to-day life with around-the-clock electricity,
clean running water and better schools.
Allawi says that if elected prime
minister, he can triple oil production in four
years and bring in more investment. He says he can
boost oil output to 6 million barrels per day, as
compared to 2.1 million presently.
Betting on
Hakim Hakim is Iran's horse and Allawi's
greatest contender. Born in 1953, the cleric is
backed by the mullahs of Tehran and Sistani, who
is originally Iranian. Hakim has called for the
partitioning of Iraq and the creation of an
autonomous mini-state for the Shi'ites in the
south.
He, like thousands of Shi'ites of
his generation, fled to Iran in the late 1970s to
avoid Saddam's persecution. In Tehran, he
co-founded the SCIRI with his brother, Mohammad
Baqir al-Hakim, on November 17, 1982. It was
created with Iranian money to oppose Saddam and
fought against the Iraqi Army during the
eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. This
greatly damaged Hakim's standing inside Iraq
because it proved that he was a Shi'ite
nationalist rather than an Iraqi nationalist. He
was willing to engage in combat and kill his
countrymen, seeing them as members of a Sunni army
or a Saddam army and not an Iraqi army.
In
December 1983, his followers were blamed for a
massive explosion that destroyed the Iraqi Embassy
in Beirut, killing many Iraqis, including Balkis
al-Rawi, the wife of the famed Syrian poet Nizar
Qabbani. Hakim led the Badr Brigades (now Badr
Organization), his Shi'ite militia, who had a
major role in the Shi'ite rebellion of 1991. He
has headed the SCIRI since the death of his
brother in a car bombing in August 2003.
Further damaging his chances is his
standing with Kuwait, Iraq's tiny but wealthy
neighbor. During the Iran-Iraq war, his men
targeted Kuwait, accusing it of supporting Saddam.
Hakim's men also tried to assassinate the Emir of
Kuwait in April 1985. More damage was caused to
the Hakim team when they were singled out to
receive funds from the US through the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998. Then, the SCIRI refused.
But by December 2001, it started to welcome
outside military intervention to topple Saddam.
In February, March and June 2002, however,
SCIRI articulated loud opposition to invasion of
Iraq. With the approval of Iran, a SCIRI
delegation headed by Hakim attended a meeting in
Washington on August 9, 2002. By October, Hakim
was welcoming military assistance to topple
Saddam. During the invasion, the SCIRI urged its
members not to fight the Americans, with Hakim
calling on them to remain neutral and to let the
United Nations administer Iraq.
Many
accused him of wanting to establish an
Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. In December 2004,
when it became clear that the Shi'ites were to
become the new leaders, veteran journalist David
Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post: "Future
historians will wonder how it happened that the
Untied States came halfway across the world,
suffered more than 1,200 dead and spent $200
billion to help install an Iraqi government whose
key leaders were trained in Iran." He added, "Iran
is about to hit the jackpot in Iraq."
In
response to accusations of striving to create a
theocracy, Hakim once said: "In regard to the
government that we want, we don't want an Islamic
government. We want a constitutional government
that preserves the rights of everybody and a
government that believes in public rights. To
respect Islam is one thing, and to establish an
Islamic government is something else." He is king
in conservative Shi'ite Muslim circles of Iraq, a
status that Allawi will find impossible to shake.
Conclusion Iraq is surrounded
by six countries - Syria, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia. All of them want to
tailor the new republic to their desires. Each of
the six countries has different cultural, ethnic
and religious sects that overlap with those of
Iraq. Iran favors the Iraqi Shi'ites, who account
for 60% of the population, the Sunni Arab states
such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan favor the Sunni
minority, while the Kurds that are dispersed over
Turkey, Syria and Iran favor the Iraqi Kurds.
The two strongest candidates, Allawi and
Hakim, are being gambled on by the two countries
that have maximum interests in Iraq - Syria and
Iran. Although Damascus and Tehran are
traditionally strong allies, with many common
interests in Lebanon and other matters, their
choices for the new leader of Iraq are very
different.
The bottom line is that Syria
wants a secular Iraq, while Iran would welcome a
theocracy. Of course, the Iraqis should be the
ones to decide, but after so many years of
dictatorship they might not be prepared to
properly take decisions in their own national
interests, leaving their tribal and religious
leaders to decide for them, topped with influence
from neighboring countries.
The only
positive factor in the Iraqi street is the desire
to move on - not necessarily a desire for
democracy, but a desire for progress and change.
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel once said: "Nothing great in the world has
ever been accomplished without passion." The
passion is there in Iraq. It is boiling like never
before. It is up to Hakim and Allawi to exploit it
wisely.
Sami Moubayed is a
Syrian political analyst.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Betting on Allawi
Betting on
Hakim
