Iran wins big
in Iraq's elections By M K
Bhadrakumar
"We knew ever since the
beginning [of the Iraq war] that the Americans
would become trapped in a quagmire ... Iraq has
become a turning point in the history of the
Middle East. If the Americans had succeeded in
subjugating Iraq, our region would have suffered
once again from colonialism, but if Iraq becomes a
democratic country that can stand on its own feet,
the Americans will face the greatest loss. In such
an eventuality, Iran and other regional states
will be able to play an important role in world
issues since they provide a huge share of the
world's energy needs. We see now that the United
States has been defeated."
Such a
statement has to have come out of Iran, and
without a
doubt President George W Bush
would attribute it to that "odd guy", as he
referred to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
in a recent PBS TV interview.
But, as with
just about anything else these days concerning the
Middle East, Bush would be dead wrong, as would be
many others who have misread Iran at this
momentous juncture in the region. The excerpts are
from a speech at Friday prayers at Tehran
University, made by someone whom the Western world
has come to regard as the consummate "pragmatic
conservative" (whatever that might mean) of
Iranian politics, former president Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani.
There is one thing for
which Rafsanjani is famous - he seldom mixes
illusions with reality. And the reality is that
the Middle East's political compass shifted last
week.
As the trends became available
regarding the Iraqi elections of last Thursday,
what has emerged is that contrary to all pre-poll
projections, the Shi'ite religious coalition, the
United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), not only held
together, but also can be expected to dominate the
new 275-member National Assembly for the next four
years.
More importantly, the "secular"
candidates who were believed to enjoy links with
the US security agencies would seem to have been
routed. Former premier Iyad Allawi's prospects of
leading the new government seem virtually nil. And
Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Accord suffered a
shattering defeat.
The prognosis that
Sunnis would flock to Allawi or that Shi'ite
constituents were disillusioned with the
"fundamentalist" UIA and would be drawn to
Allawi's secular platform has also proved to be
highly faulty.
All indications are that in
the Shi'ite provinces such as Najaf, Karbala,
Qadisiyah, Maysan, Diwaniya, Amara, Nasiriyah and
Samawa, anywhere between 70% to 90% of the votes
may have gone to the UIA, and that even in the
mixed Babil, Diyala and Baghdad provinces the UIA
may well secure the most number of seats. Some
reports indicate the UIA as getting probably as
high as 70% of the votes in Babil - a magnificent
performance in a mixed Shi'ite-Sunni province.
According to reports, early returns show a
strong performance by the followers of the
outspoken Shi'ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, on the
UIA slate. Some reports estimate Muqtada's
nominees winning almost one third of the UIA
slate.
Worse still for the US, the "Sunni
factor" choreographed by the American viceroys
also seems to have come up with surprises.
Al-Hayat newspaper commented that the two Sunni
politicians who would appear to have done
extremely well were Islamist leader Adnan Dulaimi
and Ba'athist leader Salih al-Mutlak. (The latter
is already being billed as the "Gerry Adams of
Iraq", a reference to the mercurial Sinn Fein
leader.)
Moreover, former members of the
Ba'ath Party and other militia leaders have lost
no time asserting that despite the Sunni
participation in the elections, their armed
resistance to the American military occupation
would be resumed. (Since the elections, 10 Iraqis,
including five police officers and an American,
have been killed.)
Al-Hayat quoted a
Ba'ath communique condemning the elections as an
American plot to divide Iraq along ethnic and
religious lines and vowing that resistance would
not end until US troops left Iraqi soil. So much
for the delicate distinction that American
spokesmen were making between "Ba'athists" and
"Saddamists".
With the ascendancy of
Muqtada and Mutlak in the fragmented political
spectrum, the calls for American troops to leave
Iraq can be expected to become more strident. In
the new climate, the incoming parliament itself
may well make such a formal demand on the
Americans. The hurried visit by US Vice President
Dick Cheney to Baghdad on Sunday, his first ever
since the US invasion in 2003, underscores the
disarray surfacing in Washington.
Iran
has, therefore, every reason to be pleased with
the outcome of the election. Tehran sees that Iraq
is now irreversibly on the verge of profound
change, and transition is already in the air. The
US is increasingly finding that it must come up
with a clear plan to withdraw its troops from
Iraq. As prominent Lebanese political observer
Rami Khouri wrote on Saturday, "Starting the
American military retreat from Iraq is important
because American troops will continue to be a
divisive and destabilizing force, just as the
American military presence in Saudi Arabia after
the 1991 war was a major provocation leading to
Osama bin Laden-type resistance and terror."
Khouri (who cannot be described even
remotely as "anti-American" on the intellectual
plane) suggested 18 months as a "target date" for
Washington to pull out its troops from Iraq.
Tehran is conscious that any American withdrawal
from Iraq cannot be summarily done. It will have
to be preceded by a broader regional understanding
over Iraq's stability and cohesion, which
inevitably involves Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and
Turkey. Equally so, new regional security
arrangements also become necessary.
No
less important for Tehran were the local
Palestinian elections last week in West Bank
cities. According to the preliminary results, the
Islamic militant group Hamas won resounding
victories. Coming as it does barely six weeks
ahead of crucial parliamentary elections
(scheduled for January 25), this development
significantly impacts on the Palestinian problem
and also alters the scope and dimensions of Middle
East politics as a whole.
Hamas remains
committed to the destruction of Israel, and is
considered a terrorist group by Israel, the US and
the European Union. The implications for the tepid
peace process with Israel are bound to be serious.
An existential dilemma forthwith arises for the
"international community": can it any longer
remain myopic and exclude Hamas from the the
Middle East's political landscape?
But,
more importantly, along with the significant
showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in last month's
elections in Egypt and the incremental
"Islamization" of Iraq that is unmistakably under
way (and that will get a fillip from the Iraqi
elections), Hamas' emergence at the forefront of
Palestinian politics signifies a huge eruption of
popular disenchantment with the prevailing
governance systems. Simply put, Islamism has
placed itself in the vanguard of the Middle East's
democratization - like "liberation theology" did
at one time in Latin America.
There was a
great deal of political symbolism in the fact that
Hamas' chief, Khaled Meshaal, happened to be
visiting Tehran as the results of the Palestinian
elections became known. (Interestingly, Rafsanjani
was among those in the top echelons of the Iranian
leadership who received Meshaal.)
The
Hamas leader seized the opportunity to hold a
press conference, during which he said: "If Israel
attacks Iran, then Hamas will widen and step up
its confrontation of Israelis inside Palestine ...
Hamas and other Islamic groups will stand by
Iran's side. We are defenders of Iran's obvious
right [to have a nuclear program] ... Iran is our
source of pride."
Britain has done well by
scheduling exploratory talks between the EU-3
(Britain, France and Germany) and Iran at the
official level on Wednesday. The political
geography of the Middle East is transforming so
rapidly that the protagonists cannot but factor in
an entirely new matrix of regional security and
stability. The time for indulging in sophistries
and vacuous rhetoric over Iran's nuclear issue is
running out.
The challenge facing the EU-3
lies in breaking the deadlock by advancing its
offer to Iran made in August under the terms of
the Paris Agreement. As the former International
Atomic Energy Agency head (1981-1997) and UN chief
weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, said last
week, "I am not convinced that the EU has offered
sufficiently interesting things to the Iranians
... when you compare these things that have been
offered to Iran with what has been offered to
North Korea, I am not sure that one is at the
negotiations' end."
Blix was caustic that
up to now, the EU-3 remained "constrained by the
backseat driver whom they have in the car, the
Americans".
M K Bhadrakumar
served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service for over 29 years, with postings including
India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and
to Turkey (1998-2001).
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