With the bombing of the Golden Mosque -
one of the holiest sites of Shi'ite Islam - on
February 22 and the nearly immediate retaliatory
attacks on Sunni mosques throughout Iraq, the
military phase of the struggle over the country's
political future overwhelmed and derailed its
political dynamics.
The Sunni Arab bloc in
Iraq's new parliament - the National Accord Front
(NAC) - broke off its participation in negotiations
over
the composition of a government to replace the
outgoing transitional administration. Although a
cycle of sectarian violence, marked by killings on
both sides, had been building and intensifying for
months, the bombing precipitated the first open
admission by Iraq's fragmented political class
that the country was entering the condition of
full-scale civil war. An Associated Press report
on Tuesday, citing a top unidentified Sunni
figure, said that Sunni politicians would end
their boycott.
The deep conflicts of
interest among the three major ethnic-religious
groups - Shi'ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni
Kurds - had been expected to reach a critical
point when the time came for the country's
political forces to negotiate a permanent
settlement of their differences or to move toward
separation.
That moment arrived with the
December 15 elections for a four-year parliament,
which forced the political class to confront its
stark divisions in the context of having to form a
government. As negotiations for a government
proceeded from late December into February, it
became clear that an agreement on its composition
would prove to be difficult, if not impossible, to
achieve.
Each player in the process was
compelled to clarify its demands, revealing
profound and - according to the players -
irreconcilable conflicts. Rather than signifying
an interruption of the political process, the
mosque bombing and its aftermath vividly symbolize
the failure of that process.
Behind the
violence, which justifiably occupies the attention
of the media and decision-makers in the short
term, are the persistent interests that surfaced
in the negotiations as a series of non-negotiable
demands by each side against the others. The
phrase that dominated public discussion of the
bargaining process in Iraq was "red line", meaning
a limit beyond which a player would not go in
making concessions to its adversaries. Rather than
seeking compromise, the players engaged in drawing
a crazy quilt of red lines, resulting in deadlock.
A sign as telling as the bombing that the
political process had broken down was the decision
on February 20 by US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad to go public with a threat to cut off
aid to Iraq's security forces if the Iraqi
political class did not agree to form a
"national-unity government" in which each
sectarian and ethnic bloc had a share in power and
subsumed its militia under a national army and
police force.
Asserting that the United
States was "not going to invest the resources of
the American people and build forces that are run
by people who are sectarian", Khalilzad abandoned
the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that had been his
trademark in favor of blunt external pressure that
had little credibility - an admission of
frustration. As the players proceeded on a
collision course, Washington's influence over the
negotiations steadily diminished to the point at
which it has become a bystander reduced to issuing
warnings from the sidelines.
Red lines
proliferate The stage was set for deadlock
on February 11, when the Shi'ite bloc - the United
Iraqi Alliance (UIA) - which has the largest
number of seats in the new parliament, voted 64-63
to name Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the transitional prime
minister, as its choice for premier in the
permanent government. The largest bloc in the new
parliament, holding 130 of its 275 seats against
the Sunni NAF's 55, the Kurdish Alliance's (KA) 53
and the secular Iraqi National List's (INL) 25,
the UIA has been beset by internal conflicts among
its component factions that are reflected in
Jaafari's razor-thin margin of victory.
Jaafari, who represents the Da'wa Party,
achieved his win with the support of
anti-occupation cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose
faction controls 30 of the UIA's seats. Muqtada's
backing of Jaafari was based on his opposition to
Adel Abdul Mehdi, the candidate of the UIA's
largest faction, the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI).
Although the preponderance of the
components of the UIA are based in Shi'ite
clerical families, those families and their
followers are divided by long-standing rivalries.
The winning coalition of Da'wa and the Sadrists
came at the price of honoring the SCIRI's red line
that it be awarded control of the Interior
Ministry, which is in charge of internal security
and - under the transitional government - has been
in the SCIRI's hands and has been held responsible
by Sunnis for sectarian attacks on their
community.
In response to the prospect of
continued SCIRI control over the power ministries
- Interior and Defense - NAF leader Adnan
al-Dulaimi drew his own red line, insisting that
those portfolios be given to figures who were not
identified with the Shi'ite clerical
establishment. Dulaimi's demand was met by the
leader of the SCIRI's militia, the Badr
Organization, with the assertion that the SCIRI
"will not relinquish the security portfolios".
Building on their deadlock over the power
ministries, the UIA and the NAF drew red lines on
an array of other issues. The UIA insisted that
the NAF condemn "terrorism" and actively oppose
the Sunni-led insurgency, to which the NAF replied
that the UIA must distinguish between terrorism
against civilians and legitimate resistance
against what they consider the US-led occupation.
The NAF demanded an end to the purge of
ex-Ba'ath Party members from public life, which
the UIA rejected. Most important, the NAF demanded
that Iraq's current constitution be modified to
restrict regional self-rule and the UIA insisted
that the Shi'ite-dominated south, with its vast
oil resources, move to regularize its substantial
autonomy, leaving Sunni Arabs in fear that the
resource-poor center and west of Iraq, where they
are concentrated, would be impoverished.
Reinforcing the Sunni-Shi'ite deadlock at
the level of the political class is Sunni public
opinion. A survey conducted by the Program on
International Policy Attitudes and reported in the
Washington Times on February 1 found that only 5%
of Sunni Arabs approved of the December 15
elections, 92% thought the new government was
illegitimate, and 88% approved of attacks on US
forces (see Biting the hand of friendship,
February 1). Sunni Arab participation in the
political process, which Washington believed would
integrate the Sunni community into a
nation-building project, has not had the desired
effect, but has only worked to reveal the latent
political confrontation.
A little-noticed
study conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and
Social Affairs and released in late January shows
some of the reasons for persisting Sunni Arab
disaffection. The study reported that the poverty
level in Iraq has increased by 30% since April
2003, reaching 20% of the population. Two million
Iraqis are having difficulty finding sufficient
food and shelter, and live with an income of less
than US$2 per day. The report attributed rising
poverty to the "shutdown of the public sector",
lack of access to education, and violence, all of
which differentially affect the Sunni Arab
population.
Under the pressure of
deteriorating living conditions and the resultant
disaffection of public opinion from a Shi'ite-Kurd
dominated political process, the Sunni leadership
is constrained to take a hard line, as its
opponents mobilize to maintain their present
advantages and accelerate their drive toward
regional autonomy. As the Sunnis press their
demands, the Shi'ites and the Kurds dig in and
resist making any concessions.
Although
the seemingly intractable conflict between Sunni
and Shi'ite Arabs gained the greatest attention
during the negotiations, the third player in the
struggle over Iraq's future - the Kurds - began to
assert their own demands more forcefully and drew
their own red lines.
Already running the
oil-rich northern provinces as a mini-state, the
Kurdish Alliance, composed of the Democratic Party
of Kurdistan (PDK) and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), had allied with the UIA forces in
the transitional government, but had become
dissatisfied with the treatment it had received
and was ready to act more independently in
furthering its interests.
The central
interests of the Kurds are to maintain their
effective independence and to gain control of
Kirkuk and its surrounding region, which has large
energy reserves and had been split off from the
Kurdish provinces under Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist
regime. The Kurds complain that the transitional
government, in which the Shi'ites had the
preponderant influence, did not facilitate the
resettlement of Kurds who had been displaced from
Kirkuk under Ba'athist rule, and that it failed to
put into effect provisions of the Iraqi
constitution and its subsidiary Law of
Administration that require a census in and a
referendum on the status of Kirkuk.
Already
in late January the governor of Kirkuk, Abd
al-Rahman Mustafa, had threatened to suspend oil
exports to the rest of Iraq if the central
government did not allocate funds for taking the
census and holding the referendum.
The
status of Kirkuk became an explicit "red-line
issue" when the president of the "Kurdistan
region", Masoud Barzani, declared in February that
the situation would have to be resolved
constitutionally by the end of 2007. Accession of
Kirkuk to the Kurdish mini-state is as threatening
to the Sunnis economically as the normalization of
a Shi'ite autonomous region would be, and has the
added problem that the city is multiethnic, with
Arab, Turkoman and Christian minorities that are
resistant to Kurdish hegemony.
Barzani
also drew a red line, as would be expected, around
preservation of constitutional provisions
guaranteeing regional autonomy. In a break with
the Kurdish-Shi'ite alliance, Barzani reported
that in his negotiations with the UIA he had
insisted that the secular bloc led by former
provisional prime minister Iyad Allawi be included
in a national-unity government along with the UIA,
the NAF and the KA, which was a deal-breaker for
the UIA. This was because of Muqtada's rejection
of any collaboration with Allawi, who ordered the
suppression of Muqtada's rebellion against the
occupation in 2004.
Finally, Barzani
demanded that the arrangement in the transitional
government whereby a Kurd receives the presidency
be maintained and insisted that the constitution
be changed to grant the president greater powers
at the expense of the prime minister.
In
his most revealing comment in a February 10
interview with Al-Arabiya television, Barzani said
Kurdistan would secede from Iraq if a
Sunni-Shi'ite civil war broke out and forthrightly
declared that the Kurds had a right to their own
independent state, although "we are aware of the
international and internal circumstances" standing
in the way of one.
It was in the face of
the collapsing Iraqi political process that
Khalilzad delivered his threat of an aid cutoff.
He had preceded his public announcement by
publishing an opinion column - "Blueprint for a
national government" - in which he laid out
Washington's own red line, a national-unity
government. Recognizing that marginalization and
isolation of the Sunni Arabs is at the core of the
deadlock, Khalilzad made a scarcely veiled demand
that the Kurds and the Shi'ites concede to Sunni
demands.
Using hard rhetoric, Khalilzad
wrote that Iraqi leaders "must" give "political
minorities confidence that the majority will share
power and take their legitimate concerns into
account". Specifically, Khalilzad went on, the
government "must" disband factional militias and
the Defense and Interior ministries have to be
staffed "on the basis of competence, not ethnic or
sectarian background".
He warned that the
Sunni-led insurgency would only be curbed if
regional powers were not "allowed to dominate
Iraq" and de-Ba'athification was limited to
"high-ranking officials, integrating all those who
did not commit crimes into mainstream society". On
the root issue of regional autonomy, Khalilzad was
direct: "Iraqi leaders must strike agreements that
will win greater Sunni Arab support and create a
near-consensus in favor of the constitution."
Having incorporated the entire Sunni
position into his list of demands, Khalilzad's
blueprint met with a predictable rejectionist
response from the Shi'ites and Kurds, who accused
him of violating Iraqi sovereignty and going back
on US policy by attempting to dictate a resolution
of the conflict.
In a telling and scathing
paragraph-by-paragraph critique of Khalilzad's
essay, Kurdish analyst Dr Rebwar Fatah concluded,
"Khalilzad's blueprint for Iraqi national unity
will be as successful as the British Iraq. The
difference is that in the early 20th century,
imposing superficial nation-states over ethnic and
religious groups was possible by bloodshed, but in
the 21st century, the mission of Iraqi national
unity shall remain a myth."
Conclusion The moment of
reckoning has arrived in post-Ba'athist Iraq and
none of the major players shows a trace of the
will to compromise that would be necessary to
construct a genuine nation-state, in which diverse
social groups have an overriding commitment to
live together.
Even if civil war is
averted in the short term and a government is
formed, that government will not be a genuine
national-unity administration, but an arena of
conflict between contending power groups. In one
of the most astute observations on the situation
by an Iraqi politician, Mehdi shrugged off his
loss at not becoming premier, saying that any new
government would not be popular and would not be
likely to serve out a four-year term.
A
weak central government, which seems to be
inevitable, will be starved for funds and will
have trouble enforcing security given the
preponderant slide toward confederal regionalism.
Ministerial portfolios will be allocated according
to ethnic-religious groups, and ministries will
tend to coalesce into self-enclosed fiefdoms - as
they already have in the transitional government -
that effectively resist coordinated direction from
high political officials.
With each major
bloc demanding positions with real power, there
will not be enough to go around and
dissatisfaction will build among those who feel
they have been slighted.
Most important,
the red lines that the contending players have
drawn are not preliminary negotiating positions,
but reflect deeply embedded perceptions of vital
interests that are resistant to reconciliation.
Washington has neither the trust nor the
credibility nor the resources to impose its
blueprint and will have to watch its efforts
unravel. Fatah, the Kurdish analyst, perceptively
observed that "the frustration that Khalilzad
demonstrates in his article could be interpreted
as some degree of a resignation". Increasingly
resigned to the collapse of all its plans for
Iraq, Washington has been placed in a no-win
situation. It has no prospect of a graceful exit
and seems fated to preside helplessly over Iraq's
disintegration.
Published with
permission of thePower and Interest News
Report, an analysis-based
publication that seeks to provide insight into
various conflicts, regions and points of interest
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