THE ROVING
EYE We vote, then we throw you
out By Pepe Escobar
First, a quick look at the environment
ahead of Thursday's elections in Iraq. Political
assassinations, party headquarters burned,
abductions (all largely unreported by Western
corporate media). A former prime minister, Iyad
Allawi - widely known in Baghdad as "Saddam
without a moustache" - saying on the record that
human rights in President George W Bush's Iraq are
worse than they were under Saddam.
Current
Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's Da'wa Party
accusing Allawi of defending the occupiers. Allawi
accusing Jaafari's government of corruption.
Former Pentagon asset Ahmad
Chalabi's campaign posters
with the inscription, "We liberated Iraq."
A network of secret torture prisons and
charnel houses. Fear and loathing in militia hell.
American military operations to "secure peaceful
voting". All traffic circulation prohibited by the
occupiers (to prevent car bombings). The borders
with both Syria and Jordan, as well as Baghdad's
airport, all closed.
Satanic, free and
fair We all knew what some were going to
say. Saddam Hussein - preparing his next coup de
theater in court - declared the elections "a
farce". Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers,
plus four other jihadi groups, denounced them as
"a satanic project", vowing to perpetuate the
jihad, fighting for "an Islamic state ruled by the
book [the Koran] and the traditions of Prophet
Mohammed".
Other positions are more
nuanced. On Monday, a leaflet was widely
distributed in the Azamiyah neighborhood in
Baghdad stating that Sunni Arabs might have a
chance to reinforce their position through the
elections, but "the fighting will continue with
the infidels and their followers".
The
Bush administration spin - faithfully reproduced
by Western corporate media quoting the usual ("US
officials") suspects - follows the same wishful
script: a "large turnout" among the "disaffected
Sunni Arab minority" that "could" produce a
government "capable of winning the trust of the
Sunnis", "defusing the insurgency" and thus
leading the US "and other foreign troops" to start
going home by 2006.
The favorite
Anglo-American election candidate supposedly
capable of pulling it all off is once again Allawi
- a truculent secular Shi'ite who was once a
Ba'athist (he has kept the good connections)
before he became anti-Saddam and a US intelligence
asset. The White House may forget it, but Iraqis
don't; Allawi gave the go-ahead for the American
leveling of Fallujah and the American bombing of
holy Najaf in 2004.
A few days ago he was
bombarded with shoes and chased away from the Imam
Ali shrine in Najaf. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair supports him and considers him "the best
hope" for Iraq. Pentagon analysts agree, as one of
them told The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh that "he
would allow us to keep Special Forces operations
inside Iraq ... mission accomplished. A coup for
Bush."
But no amount of feel good stories
disguise the fact that the American project is
doomed to fail because the premise itself is
flawed - a semblance of democracy as the offspring
of an illegal invasion and foreign occupation.
Moreover, this White House-promoted and/or imposed
"fast food democracy" has been sectarian-based
from the start. It is inexorably leading to the
Lebanonization of Iraq, a phenomenon parallel to
the Iraqification of the occupation.
Iraqi
voters have their own reasons to question whether
these elections are free and fair. For starters,
most are not interested; what really glues them to
TV sets is Saddam on trial (the majority of
Iraqis, Shi'ites and Kurds, has already condemned
him to death). There's poor security for the
voters; they can only hope they won't be blown to
smithereens when they take the mandatory walk to
the polling station to choose between 231
political parties, coalitions and individual
candidates.
And there's little security
for the almost 7,000 candidates either. The bulk
of the campaigning has been on TV; this means only
a few flush parties stood a chance. Live
campaigning led in many cases to abduction and
even assassination. Moreover, most voters are not
exactly sure of what they're doing. Recent polls
have revealed that at least half of the Iraqi
population is still not convinced of the merits of
Western-style democracy, at least the White
House-promoted version.
Half believe that
the occupiers should have never set foot in
Mesopotamia. Sixty percent think that they turned
the country into an even bigger disaster than it
was after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the
first Gulf war in 1991 and 12 years of United
Nations sanctions. And two thirds of the
population wants the occupiers out. Half the
people polled by the BBC said Iraq needed a strong
leader (a "Saddam without a moustache"?) And only
28% said democracy was a priority.
The
full Shi'ite agenda It takes just a little
political acumen to tell which way the (desert)
wind blows. By the end of November, Shi'ite
firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had made his
move, coming out with all his political guns
blazing to promote a "pact of honor", which he
called Iraqi parties to subscribe to.
Last
Thursday, in the Baghdad neighborhood of
Kadhimiya, the 14-point pact was signed by an
impressive array of political heavyweights. Among
them: the two main Shi'ite parties, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)
and Da'wa; the Sadrists; the Iraqi Concord Front
(which is a coalition of the three major Sunni
Arab parties); Ahmad Chalabi (in person); members
of the de-Ba'aathification committee; a number of
tribal chiefs; unions; social associations; and
government employees.
Among the crucial
points of the pact are: withdrawal of the
occupiers and setting of an objective timetable
for their withdrawal from Iraq; elimination of all
the consequences of their presence, including any
bases for them in the country, while working
seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security
institutions and military forces within a defined
schedule; no more immunity for the occupation
troops; no relations whatsoever with Israel; a
condemnation of terrorism ("We condemn terrorism
and acts of violence, killing, abducting and
expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian
reasons."); a condemnation of the Ba'ath Party as
"a terrorist organization" and an urge "to speed
up the trial of overthrown president Saddam
Hussein"; and a decision to "postpone the
implementation of the disputed principle of
federalism".
This, in a nutshell, is the
Shi'ite agenda for the new Iraq, potentially
embracing 62% of the population of roughly 25
million to 26 million. The pact may have been a
Sadrist move, but there's no reason to believe
these decisions will not be implemented as the
United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which is dominated by
the SCIRI, Da'wa and the Sadrists, is set to
become the majority in the new, 275-member Iraqi
National Assembly. The whole numbers issue in the
elections is by which percentage the UIA will be a
majority compared to the Kurdistan coalition and
the Iraqi Concord Front.
The main
players The UIA, list number 555, created
with the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, received almost 50% of the votes in
the January elections. Now the 18-party UIA is
weaker because some parties defected. Sistani
stated his position last Sunday. In January, he
practically ordered all Shi'ites to vote for the
UIA. Now, he is more nuanced. "These elections are
just as important as the preceding ones, and
citizens - both male and female - must participate
in them on a wide scale in order to guarantee a
big and powerful presence for those who will
safeguard their verities and work energetically
for their higher interests in the next
parliament."
Although not explicitly
endorsing the UIA, he did advise all Shi'ites to
not split and not waste their vote; this would
mean something like "vote for the UIA, not for
Allawi". Politically, the UIA has been heavily
criticized by Iraqis themselves for being utterly
impotent - and incompetent - while dealing with
corruption and fighting against both the Sunni
Arab resistance and the jihadi groups.
The
eight-party Kurdistan coalition list, number 730,
remains dominated by the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, headed by the current Iraqi president,
Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdish Democratic Party,
headed by Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi
Kurdistan. They have been allies to the UIA in
government for the past 10 months, but the
infighting is abysmal. The only thing the Kurds
actually care about is Kirkuk and its oil wealth -
and how they can prevent Sunni Arabs and Turkmen
from having a slice of the cake.
The
15-group Iraqi National List, number 731, secular
and pan-sectarian, is headed by Allawi. The list
includes the Communist Party, former foreign
minister (pre-Saddam) Adnan al-Pachachi (a Sunni
Arab), a few tribal sheikhs and even some liberal
Shi'ite clerics.
They say they will fight
the Sunni Arab resistance (would that mean
leveling Ramadi now instead of Fallujah?),
establish a strong central government (SCIRI,
Da'wa and the Sadrists would never let them get
away with it), revise the de-Ba'athification laws
(so Allawi can get his former pals back to
government) and return more former officers of the
Iraqi Army disbanded by former proconsul L Paul
Bremer to the new security forces (once again,
over the dead body of the SCIRI, Da'wa and the
Sadrists).
The Iraqi Concord Front, number
618, is an alliance of three mostly Islamist Sunni
Arab groups. All of them boycotted the January
elections. Their platform includes total American
withdrawal, and of course bringing back former
Sunni Arab Iraqi Army officers. They also want to
change the constitution - again - eliminating the
newfound regional power and reinforcing the
authority of Baghdad.
The 10-party Iraqi
National Congress (INC) list, number 569, is
headed by former Pentagon asset, current deputy
prime minister and eternal revivalist, Chalabi. He
split from the UIA to form his own group. Chalabi
obviously preaches fighting against the Sunni Arab
resistance and in impeccable populist fashion
promised every Iraqi family cash derived from
Iraq's oil money plus a piece of land for every
family that did not yet own a home.
All's well in militia hell When
they are not occupied dodging bullets or trying to
spend at least one hour of the day with some water
and electricity, Iraqis see rot piling up
everywhere. The Allawi-Chalabi (they are cousins)
mini-war gets dirtier by the day. The British
government is according to some unconfirmed
reports pulling out all the stops to stall an
investigation into the theft of more than US$1.3
billion from the Ministry of Defense. This favors
- who else - Allawi, because the money
"disappeared" during his corruption-infested six
months as prime minister.
Then there's the
rot in the Ministry of Interior. Bayan Jabr, the
minister, is from the SCIRI. He controls about
110,000 men armed to their teeth. The SCIRI's
militia, the Badr Organization, formerly the Badr
Brigade, rule the ministry and have infiltrated
paramilitary police commandos, which are in fact
"legal" death squads specialized in terrorizing
Sunni Arabs. In parallel, Muqtadar's Mahdi Army
controls most of Baghdad's police. Many people
tend to forget that Baghdad is a predominantly
Shi'ite city.
This country is no more
None of this points to national cohesion.
"Iraq" as we know it - the unified, heavily
centralized state with arbitrary borders drawn on
a paper napkin by Britain after World War I - may
be on its way to extinction after these elections.
Partition is de facto in the four
provinces of Kurdistan - roughly between 15% and
20% of the total population, self-governed and
with their own army and police. The billion-dollar
question is how the SCIRI, Da'wa and the Sadrists
will conform a Shi'iteistan composed of nine
Shi'ite provinces out of Iraq's 18. This would be
the logical outcome after the American-designed
constitution approved in the October 15
referendum. The SCIRI's leader, Abd al-Aziz
al-Hakim, definitely wants a Shi'iteistan.
The US would be left with little more than
the Green Zone - which is not exactly an oil lake
- and a lot of empty desert. Essentially, Kurds
and Shi'ites will be able to decide what to do
with their oil revenues. The Kurds, for instance,
have already signed a contract with a Norwegian
oil company to drill for oil.
Election or
no election, the ultimate blood-drenched quagmire
will remain fully operational. Al-Qaeda will keep
suicide bombing to death. Shi'ite death squads
will keep executing Sunni Arabs. Shi'ite and Kurd
politicians will keep squabbling - while Kurdistan
and Shi'iteistan further ignore Baghdad. The
Americans will keep controlling nothing - not even
the road from the airport to the Green Zone.
"Reconstruction" will remain non-existent - until
the probably not-too-distant day when the Shi'ite
signatories of the "pact of honor" - the probable
election winners - will muster the will to tell
the occupiers "you're out - and don't forget to
pack your military bases as well".
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