Iraq's next premier: Spot the
difference By Sami Moubayed
Many in Iraq and the rest of the Arab
world breathed a sigh of relief when it was
announced that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari
would step down and be replaced by his
right-hand-man, Jawad al-Maliki. His nomination
has been endorsed by the United Iraqi Alliance
(UIA), a Shi'ite coalition that dominates
parliament (and of which he is a member), and
President Jalal Talabani.
Jaafari, after
all, had crippled political life in Iraq by
arrogantly clinging on to power since February,
ignoring all calls made by Shi'ites, Sunnis and
Kurds for him to step down. They accuse him
of being weak, and his
record shows that he has been highly ineffective
in bringing security to the war-torn country.
Jaafari leaves power with an average 25 Iraqis
dying per day, and a total death toll of more than
35,000 since the war began in 2003.
Maliki
inherits a country that is scarred by sectarian
violence, filled with mass graves created after
the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and divided
by political and religious ambitions as never
before in its history.
There is nothing in
his background, however, to show that Jawad
al-Maliki will be any better than Ibrahim
al-Jaafari. Maliki, after all, has all of
Jaafari's weaknesses and none of his strengths.
Jaafari is more experienced, better connected in
the Arab world, and more politically independent
than Maliki. Like Jaafari, however, Maliki is a
product of political Islam. Both of them are
allied to the rebel-cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and
both are equally sectarian in their policies,
having turned a blind eye to the Shi'ite death
squads that roamed the streets of Iraq and gunned
down prominent Sunnis after February's bombing of
a holy Shi'ite shrine in Samarra.
The two
men claim to oppose sectarian violence, and both
call for incorporating the militias into the Iraqi
army. Both are in favor of appointing sectarian
officials at the ministries of Defense and
Interior, a demand that is backed by their ally
Muqtada al-Sadr. Both are opposed to collaborating
with the strong and US-backed former secular prime
minister Iyad Allawi.
Both are friends of
Iran, although they do not take orders directly
from the mullahs of Tehran, unlike the Iran-backed
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq
(SCIRI) and its leader Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. Both
want to create an Iran-like regime in Iraq but one
that is politically independent from Tehran.
They share three good traits in common:
both respect the integrity of the country and
refuse to create a Shi'ite regime in the south;
both want to crush the Sunni insurgency of former
Ba'athists and the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda; and
both are guided by the rules and wisdom of Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
From a prominent
Shi'ite family, Jawad al-Maliki was born in 1950
in Babil, 100 kilometers south of Baghdad. He
studied Arabic literature at Baghdad University
and joined al-Da'wa, the strongest and oldest of
the Islamic parties in Iraq, while working at the
Education Department in Hula. It was during this
time that he met Ibrahim al-Jaafari, another
promising young member of al-Da'wa who was three
years his senior, and who had studied medicine in
Iraq.
When Saddam Hussein came to power in
1979, he outlawed al-Da'wa, accusing its leaders
of being on the payroll of the newly created
Islamic regime in Iran and working to topple his
secular Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. By 1980,
al-Da'wa was outlawed and many of its leading
members were either arrested, killed, or forced
into exile. The party says that from 1982-84,
Saddam murdered 77,000 of its members.
Maliki moved to Syria at a time when that
country's late president Hafez al-Assad was
playing host to the Iraqi opposition. Jaafari went
to Iran. From Damascus, Maliki led a branch of
al-Da'wa, coordinating efforts against Saddam's
dictatorship, while Jaafari briefly led al-Da'wa
from Iran before going to Europe to set up a
branch in London. Both Maliki and Jaafari returned
to Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. Jaafari
became vice president, while Maliki became head of
the Security Committee in the Iraqi Assembly
before becoming official spokesman for the UIA.
Since last year, he has been spokesman for
Jaafari and appeared frequently on satellite
television and in press interviews, vigorously
defending Jaafari's crippled government. He also
served as head of a de-Ba'athification committee
in post-Saddam Iraq, which was charged with
purging all Ba'athists - even those who had joined
the party simply to get better wages - from
government posts to punish them for having worked
under Saddam. The New York Times described Jawad
al-Maliki as "an outspoken and highly visible
member of parliament".
With such a record,
what do the Iraqis expect from Jawad al-Maliki?
Will he succeed where his boss failed: mainly
disarming the Shi'ite militias and ending the
Sunni insurgency? Will he restore confidence to
the Sunnis, who feel persecuted and in grave
danger after so many attacks targeting their
mosques and clerics since February? Will he remain
politically independent of Iran or will the
Iranians lure him into their orbit? And if they
do, what would Iraq look like if it were directly
and publicly controlled by the Iranian regime?
Will he manage to walk the tightrope among Sunnis,
Shi'ites and Kurds and create a cabinet of
national unity?
Will he give the
ministries of Interior and Defense to sectarian
officials, as Jaafari did in 2005-06, or will he
abide by the request of US Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad and bring a professional, non-sectarian
official, perhaps Iyad Allawi himself, to the two
security ministries? Most important, will he be
able to shake off the towering influence of
Muqtada al-Sadr? It was Sadr's influence, after
all, that won Jaafari the election within the UIA
back in February. And it was Sadr's influence as
well that ruined Jaafari in the eyes of the
Sunnis, seculars, Kurds, and Americans and brought
down his government.
It is certainly too
early to judge Jawad al-Maliki. Nothing guarantees
that his nomination and acceptance by Talabani,
will be endorsed by the Sunnis and Kurds or the
secular Shi'ites. If he fails to create a cabinet,
the other name floating in the air is that of Ali
al-Adeeb, another senior member of al-Da'wa who
was considered for the premiership over the past
couple of days. Adeeb, however, is not very
different from either Maliki or Jaafari and is
less known than either men in the Arab world and
international community. Like them, he was
nourished on the ideas of al-Da'wa, under the
influence of his uncle Salah al-Adeeb, one of the
founders of the party in the 1950s.
The
similarities among Maliki, Adeeb and Jaafari are
too difficult to ignore, and the rival Iraqi
politicians might realize that they are back to
Square 1, with someone like Jawad al-Maliki, who
looks like Jaafari, acts like Jaafari, thinks like
Jaafari, and is the product of the same political
school as Jaafari. History - which will be tough
on Jaafari - is yet to judge the caliber and
regime of Maliki.
Sami Moubayed
is a Syrian political analyst. He is the author of
Steel & Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped
Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press, 2005).
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Hussein, and divided
by political and religious ambitions as never
before in its history. 
