Arab News Blog

My thanks to AP for having compiled and published these (most likely conservative) figures today:

U.S. TROOP LEVELS:

March 31, 2003: 90,000.

October 2007: 170,000 at peak of troop buildup.

March 1, 2010: Just over 96,000.

COALITION TROOP LEVELS:

Number of countries that participated in “Coalition for the Immediate Disarmament of Iraq” at the start of the war: 31, including the United States.

As of August 2009, all non-U.S. coalition members had withdrawn from Iraq.

PRIVATE CONTRACTORS:

Number of U.S. private contractors in Iraq as of August, 2008: 190,000.

CASUALTIES:

Confirmed U.S. military deaths as of March 19, 2010: at least 4,385.

States with the highest number of U.S. troop deaths as of March 19, 2010: California, 470; Texas, 411; Pennsylvania, 195; Florida, 193; New York, 188; Ohio, 183; Michigan, 159; Illinois, 156.

Deaths of civilian employees of U.S. government contractors in Iraq as of Dec. 31, 2009: 1,457.

Deaths of coalition troops (non-U.S.) as of March 19, 2010: at least 315.

Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion: more than 95,680, according to the Iraq Body Count database.

COST:

More than $712 billion, according to the National Priorities Project. To date, $747.3 billion has been allocated to the war in Iraq since 2003. In August 2008, the Congressional Budget Office projected that additional war costs for the next 10 years could range from $440 billion to $865 billion.

COST PER MONTH:

As of July 2008, the Department of Defense’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $9.9 billion for Iraq.

As of July 2009, the Department of Defense’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $7.3 billion for Iraq.

INDICTMENTS AND CONVICTIONS:

As of Jan. 30, 2010, the work of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction investigators has resulted in 26 arrests, 33 indictments, 25 convictions, and more than $53 million in fines, forfeitures, recoveries and restitution.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN IRAQ:

January 2004: 30-45 percent.

January 2010: an estimated 15.5-30 percent.

COST OF A BARREL OF OIL:

March 28, 2003: $21.50.

March 12, 2010: $77.32.

OIL PRODUCTION

Prewar: 2.58 million barrels per day.

March 17, 2010: 2.43 million barrels per day.

ELECTRICITY:

Prewar nationwide: 3,958 megawatts. Hours per day (estimated): 4-8.

March 3, 2010: Nationwide: 6,090 megawatts. Hours per day: 15.0.

Prewar Baghdad: 2,500 megawatts. Hours per day (estimated): 16-24.

March 3, 2010: Baghdad: Megawatts N/A. Hours per day: 15.5.

Note: Current Baghdad megawatt figures are no longer reported by the U.S. State Department’s Iraq Weekly Status Report.

TELEPHONES:

Prewar land lines: 833,000.

Jan. 2010: 1,300,000.

Prewar cell phones: 80,000.

Jan. 2010: An estimated 19.5 million.

WATER:

Prewar: 12.9 million people had potable water.

Jan. 30, 2010: More than 21.2 million people have potable water.

SEWERAGE:

Prewar: 6.2 million people served.

Jan. 30, 2010: 11.5 million people served.

INTERNET SUBSCRIBERS:

September 2003: 4,900.

Jan. 2010: 1,600,000.

INTERNAL REFUGEES:

Prewar: 1,021,962.

March 2010: At least 1.5 million people are currently displaced inside Iraq.

EMIGRANTS:

Prewar: 500,000 Iraqis living abroad.

March 2010: Approximately 2 million Iraqis, mainly in Syria and Jordan.

Jan. 2010: At least 216,430 refugees and internally displaced persons have returned to Iraq.

All figures are the most recent available.

Sources: The Associated Press, State Department, Defense Department, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, The Brookings Institution, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, National Priorities Project, Department of Labor, Congressional Budget Office, Iraq Body Count, Energy Information Administration.

Let us also remember that the ‘pre-war baseline’ presented itself represented a standard of life (and death) for the Iraqi people that had been massively depressed as a result of 13 years of very tight sanctions, whose tightness was maintained from about 1993– Clinton’s arrival in power– primarily by the insistence of the U.S. and its sidekick in the U.K. on maintaining them in a punitively tight way. Throughout that period, the U.N. estimated that around 500,000 Iraqis, mainly the very young and the very old, died deaths that would have been avoidable in the absence of sanctions.

In memoriam of all those who died and with solidarity and compassion for all who survived.

~HC

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Yesterday I went to book talk that National Public Radio’s Deborah Amos gave about her new book Eclipse of the Sunnis; Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East. She’s an engaging person and a smart reporter who’s been working in the Middle East for many years now.

The talk was ways too short for my taste! In the course of of it, she explained that when she started the book, she had intended for it to be about Iraqi exiles, in general; but then it transmuted itself into a book that’s more about “the eclipse of the Sunnis.” She also noted that the title arouses very different reactions from western and Arabic audiences, with the latter being quite shocked by it while most westerners see nothing shocking in it at all.

Well, I’ve read a couple of chapters now, and I don’t really think the title is perfect. Not least because there is– as she had told us at the talk– one whole chapter there about the Christian Iraqis who make up roughly 15% of the exiles, though only 3 % of the national population.

The book seems to have been reported mainly from Syria and Jordan.

In her talk yesterday, Amos stressed that the exile from Iraq has been particularly harsh for many or most Iraqi exiles because back home they had mostly been people with good educations, and a fair or high degree of financial and professional standing. So the loss of that sense of security– and the fact that, for many of these families, they now find the children are getting far worse educations than their parents, or no education at all, and that so little help has been given them– has in any cases made the come-down particularly hard to bear.

These refugees do not, she said, fit most people’s stereotypical idea of what a ‘refugee’ looks like. And she added that this was really the first time this had ever happened to such a huge swathe of the middle- and upper-middle class of a country.

Actually, I’m not so sure about that latter point… It was also, after all, what happened to just about the whole of the middle- and upper-middle-class of Palestine during the nakba of 1947-49.

There’s another parallel in these two situations, too– though she gives this fact no acknowledgment. In the Introduction she writes,

Iraqis are tied to their homeland through technology… There is no model for this middle-class exodus in the Arab world. In chat rooms and on cellphones, web cameras, and blogs, a larger Iraq exists. The community of exiles is in daily contact waiting for word from home that it is time to come back. The rest of the region is waiting, too.

Well, I’m not sure how many Palestinian homes Amos has been into recently. But the Palestinian diaspora is significantly more far-flung (and more populous) than the Iraqi diaspora… Moreover, at this point, every single Palestinian family, except for a few families that all have citizenship in Israel, has close family members distributed among five or six different countries or jurisdictions. And they all try to keep in good touch with each other, and with relatives back “home”, using Skype and blogs and every other electronic means at their disposal. Indeed, the distribution of this new(-ish) technology among Palestinian refugees has done more than just keep the sense of national belonging intact; I think it has also been working to create an entirely new kind of sense of national belonging. Maybe, even of a “virtual Palestine”, that is in no way removed from the concerns of the terrestrial one.

Just like the Iraqi refugees.

But I think that’s a quibble. As far as I can see, Amos has written a book that sensitively portrays the deep sadness of the exiles and the very many challenges they face. She also seems honest about the degree of responsibility our country must bear for their fate.

On p. xv she writes:

This new exodus was not the narrative that the Bush administration wanted to project, or acknowledge, and remained invisible for much of the world. The U.S. security plan known as the surge was an American success story, but it was a sideshow for those forced out of hoes and neighborhoods in a power struggle that used displacement and exile as a weapon. More Iraqis left the country in 2007 than in 2006, the year that the surge got underway. The international Organization for Migration… was tracking widespread displacements in 2007; the movement inside the country had increased by a factor of 20. Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops, spread out across Baghdad, brought no return of the exiles… on the ground the Sunni-Shiite divide was still steeped in blood.

In her talk yesterday, which was hosted by the Women’s Foreign Policy Group here in DC, Amos said that her understanding is that most Iraqi exiles are watching the results of the recent elections carefully, and that if Allawi does well they will have more reason to consider returning home than if anyone else wins. His Iraqiyya bloc is the only one with any significant Sunni members in it.

She noted that candidates who’d earlier risen to prominence with the (U.S.-funded) Sunni “Awakening” groups were doing really badly.

(Also doing badly, according to Visser, has been Ali Faisal al-Lami, the executive director of the Debaathification commission. That should make many of the exiles happy!)

Anyway, though I disagree a little with some of the judgments Amos makes in her book, all-in-all I think it’s a really excellent and important volume. Everyone here in the U.S. who might want (and perhaps understandably so) to forget as much as they can about the Bush years and all the really terrible decisions Pres. Bush made– including the decision to invade Iraq– needs to remember that those decisions had far greater, and graver, consequences on the people of Iraq than they have had on our people. Deborah Amos does a great job of taking us into the lives, concerns, and essential humanity of some of the millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes as a result of our country’s invasion.

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It is now more than eleven days since the polls closed in Iraq’s March 7 election, and we still have no final answer. The latest information on the election commission’s website tells us that 89% of the total vote has now been counted. How long will that last 11% take?

The long-drawn-out process by which the votes have been tallied, checked, and provisional vote-counts released has led to swings in expectations– as of now, it seems that Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiyya bloc is ahead by a hair– and a growing drumbeat of concern about the integrity of the counting process. Today, some supporters of PM Nouri al-Maliki were reported by Reuters as complaining about vote fraud. Over at the BBC, meanwhile, Allawi was judiciously saying only that “there are irregularities that must be clarified”, though Stephen Sackur was– in a highly irresponsible way– trying to push him into making outright allegations of vote fraud.

What does seem to be the case as of now is that followers of Moqtada Sadr, acting within the broader INA bloc, have been doing much better than anyone expected. Reidar Visser has calculated that, at the two-thirds-counted mark, in the twelve provinces in which the INA has been a big factor, the Sadrists had pulled in 34 of the 65 seats won by the INA.

Many commentators are now predicting that the Sadrists will be able to play a key kingmaking role once all the count has been completed, since Maliki’s State of Law bloc and Allawi’s Iraqiyya will most likely come out very closely tied. Because of the close finish, the coalition-forming process this time around may well prove to be as long-drawn-out and politically complex as it was after the December 2005 election. Though let us all very fervently hope, pray, and (where possible) work so that this period of political uncertainty does not see the same kind of horrendous descent into sectarian violence that Iraq saw back in early 2006.

I do think that this time around, the clear understanding by all parties that the U.S. occupation troops are now, absolutely, on their way out– in implementation of the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement– should help motivate all authentically Iraqi political figures to find a way to cooperate with each other in this period rather than engaging in an orgy of political violence while still hoping that at some stage the U.S. will save their skins (which was one of the things that, I think, happened in 2006.)

Visser had these additional comments on the Sadrists:

it seems the Sadrists were a lot more successful with their “primaries” last autumn than ISCI… One of the remarkable aspects of the Sadrist success is their ability to use the open-list vote strategically, i.e. by spreading the vote on a number of winning candidates across the list (the more usual pattern is that a limited number of highly popular candidates stand out)… Additionally, the Sadrists, led by a 7-man committee of scholars based in Najaf who have liaised with Muqtada al-Sadr, have put a great effort into promoting individual candidates and providing voters with information on their educational and career backgrounds. But Sadrist voters are not doing this blindly: Some Sadrist candidates have been effectively demoted, such as Qusay Abd al-Wahhab, number six on the original list in Baghdad, and a deputy in the outgoing parliament.

… It seems inevitable that the remarkable Sadrist comeback at some point will be reflected in different coalition-forming dynamics. So far, this tentative process has remained dominated by the old elites, but what is really the point in negotiating with a 16-man bloc such as ISCI/Badr? With 34 plus candidates, the Sadrist will form a sizeable contingent of deputies comparable to the Kurdistan Alliance and as such will constitute an independent centre of power in the next Iraqi parliament.

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With Iraqi electoral results finally beginning to be released, with over 60% reporting for many provinces, expect to see a lot of analysis of the results in the coming days on the Middle East Channel and elsewhere.  Reider Visser has already been doing some great work identifying how the Sadrists are catapulting over ISCI candidates thanks to the open list voting system in Baghdad and other provinces.   I was struck this morning by the results in Anbar, where Shaykh Ahmed Abu Risha’s Awakenings List (part of Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani’s Unity of Iraq List), seems headed for a near epic wipe-out.   That is quite a comedown for the heir to Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha’s Anbar Awakening, whose decision to align with the U.S. against al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Islamic State of Iraq in the months before the "Surge" proved so pivotal, and a sign that the leaders of the Awakening may not have found a path to national political power through the ballot box after all.   Is this a cause for concern? 

[[BREAK]]

The election results are not yet final, but at this point the trend looks clear enough.  With 78% reporting, Abu Risha’s Unity of Iraq List has received less than 32,000 votes and is not only being thoroughly crushed by Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya List (with almost 220,000 votes) but even trails the supposedly decimated Tawaffuq List (over 40,000 votes).   The fiery Shaykh Ali Hatem Sulayman joined Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition, but the entire list has yet to reach 5000 votes.  Recruiting the outspoken Hamed al-Hayyes to the primarily Shia Iraqi National Alliance has thus far attracted less than 4000 votes.  Unity of Iraq may just squeak out a single seat, but even that looks like it may be close.  

Over the last few years, most American analysts have argued that these elections would offer a path to power through the ballot box for the leaders of the Awakenings.   Their evident washout in Anbar suggest that they won’t, which may trigger a lot of the fears of those analysts (including me) who for years warned about the dangers of not accommodating Sunnis in the political system or integrating the Awakenings and Sons of Iraq into the state.  But the response thus far suggests reasons to be less worried than in the past.  During last January’s provincial election, when it appeared that Abu Risha’s list had lost,  he threatened to turn Anbar into a "graveyard" for the Islamic Party if his List was not declared the victor.  Despite mounting claims of fraud, I haven’t yet been seeing many such threats this time, and don’t see any reason yet to anticipate that it will trigger the much-feared resurgence of the insurgency. 

That may be because the result does not come out of nowhere.  The Awakenings seem to have lost some of their allure as they failed to deliver rapid improvements in governance or the economy, and as complaints about corruption grew against the new incumbents.  Lots of personal, tribal, and political conflicts have played out in public, while the unifying threat of the intense battle with the Islamic State of Iraq has faded.   The Awakenings have always been fragmented and internally competitive, which was only exacerbated by the formation of electoral lists.    Abu Risha’s highly public flirtation with Prime Minister Maliki did not play well with Anbar’s Sunni citizens, and then he was caught in the national collapse of  Bolani’s list.  Meanwhile, Allawi appears to have captured the mantle of the "Sunni vote" for strategically minded voters, while the de-Ba’athification circus likely focused attention on the national level.  

Still, it can’t help but feel like a sign of the times.  Abu Risha and his late brother were the face of American cooperation with the Sunnis against al-Qaeda.  His defeat, and the general irrelevance of the Awakenings to the Anbar election results, offers one more suggestion of the waning influence of the U.S. and how little cachet such relationships still hold (and, no doubt, of the "betrayal" likely felt by many of its members).   But it also may hold a hopeful sign that Iraq has moved on, with different national political issues and leaving behind even the recent past.   I find it reassuring that I’m not yet seeing much talk of turning Anbar into a graveyard over the election results… though I’ll be watching. 

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Al-Hayat [Life] is reporting in Arabic that Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby now says that the US military withdrawal from Iraq is on schedule and that only 50,000 US troops will be in the country by the end of August. He also affirmed that the Iraqi military and police are now capable of keeping order in Iraq, saying that the role they played in providing security during the March 7 elections shows that they have made a big advance in their capabilities.

The Obama administration is eager to get out of Iraq militarily, and so far is experiencing good luck insofar as security has improved, and the civil war has subsided.

The parliamentary election has also not developed into an obstacle to withdrawal. Indeed, it is likely to produce a government that looks somewhat like that of summer, 2006, with Nuri al-Maliki again prime minister and a national unity cabinet with representation for the Shiite fundamentalist parties and for the secular Sunni-Shiite coalition of Iyad Allawi. It will take weeks or months to cobble this ‘alliance of rivals’ together, since government ministries are given out as inducements, and there is wrangling over who gets what. (Iraq operates by the ’spoils system’ common in the 19th century US, whereby victorious parties get to hire their party workers to staff government jobs in the ministries they control).

That al-Maliki is likely to get a second term has pros and cons for Washington. The pros are that there will be continuity in Iraqi politics, that al-Maliki has gotten control of the armed forces and will remain in control, and that while he has good relations with Iran, he is not as close to Tehran as some of the fundamentalist Shiite parties in the Iraqi National Alliance. The cons are that al-Maliki has shown little interest in reconciliation with secular, Arab nationalist Sunnis, that he has cultivated tribal militias loyal to himself, and that he has not shown very much interest in or capacity for starting and speeding along projects key to Iraq’s economic infrastructure. Washington would no doubt prefer to have an anti-Iran prime minister like Allawi, and one less hostile to Israel.

Al-Hayat also says that the Independent High Electoral Commission in Iraq has released further partial results from the March 7 parliamentary election, showing that the State of Law coalition of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is substantially ahead in Basra, with the fundamentalist religious parties of the Iraqi National Alliance coming in second in the southern Shiite oil port. (See also the numbers below).

Al-Maliki’s coalition is also said to be leading by a good margin in Baghdad province (where it had won 38% in last year’s provincial elections). This assertion is contested, however, by political commentator Hazim al-Na’imi, who expects Baghdad in the end to divide its vote in almost equal thirds among al-Maliki’s coalition and its two major allies. Al-Hayat says that with 60% of the vote counted, Baghdad has returned 158,763 votes for al-Maliki’s party, 108,126 for the Shiite Iraqi National Alliance, and 104,810 for Allawi’s secular Iraqiya.

Al-Hayat says its sources close to al-Maliki report that he has become convinced that he will remain prime minister, insofar as his coalition defeated the Iraqi National Alliance, Shiite parties close to Iran, among the 60% of the population that is Shiite Muslim.

The National Iraqi List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, which has attracted a lot of Sunni Arab votes along with those of secular-minded Shiites, is coming in third after the Shiite fundamentalists, but only by a small margin.

Although Allawi’s secular party has largely supplanted the Sunni fundamentalist party, the Iraqi National Accord (Tawafuq), the members of the cabinet will likely be somewhat similar to those of past Iraqi governments.

Reader Harmis4 helpfully writes in:

“Results as Sunday 7PM EST

The IHEC has released election PDF files of 10 provinces on it’s website. Perhaps 10% of the national vote is listed. The combined totals and the estimated seat distribution based on Iraqi Electoral Law and the partial totals are as follows.

State of Law – 345,005 57 Seats

Iraqi National Movement – 290,724 58 seats

Iraqi National Alliance – 276,403 48 seats

Kurdistan Alliance – 130,409 14 seats

Iraq Unity Coalition 31,150 4 seats

Iraq Accordance – 30,360 9 seats

Change – 22,948 2 seats

Kurdistan Islamic Group – 12,511 1 seat

Islamic Union of Kurdistan – 11,173 1 seat

Others 70,085 0 seats

Total: 1,220,768 194 of 310 regular seats.

More of the mainly Sunni Provinces are in in than the Shia or Kurd.

Based on these results the final seat totals may look something like this.

Rule of Law – Maliki – 90 to 95 Seats

National Movement – Allawi/Hashimi 80 Seats

Iraq National Alliance – Hakim/Sadr
75 to 80 seats

Kurdistan Alliance – Talabani/Barzani 40 seats

Small Parties – 75 Seats including 8 religious minority seats”

End/ (Not Continued)

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Partial results for Iraq’s elections show PM Nouri Maliki’s coalition ahead in the crucial area of Baghdad, officials say.
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Iraq’s Independent Higher Election Commission (IHEC) has taken much longer than expected to publish the results of the general election conducted five days ago, on Sunday. Their English-language website is here. I leave it to my esteemed friend Reidar Visser to interpret the details of what the IHEC has been releasing– e.g. here, yesterday evening. I will note only that the “latest news” posted here on the IHEC website tells us that they have (very) preliminary results only from five of Iraq’s 18 provinces– and of those, in the province in which the vote-counting was most complete, Najaf, the proportion of votes counted was still only 34.11%!

So it is still far too early to “call” the election even there. It looks as though the process of counting all the votes throughout the country will be a long one indeed.

Which need not be a problem in itself. There are plenty of countries in which vote-counting takes one or two weeks, due to to poor infrastructure of various kinds. And in this election, it’s true that the ballot sheets are enormous and complex, thus very difficult to handle in bulk and to tally.

However, the slowness of the IHEC in completing its work is bound to raise fears and tensions throughout the country, especially fears and accusations of ballot-rigging– just as happened in Afghanistan after last August’s election.

In Afghanistan, the sharp inter-party tensions that arose after the election were only finally reduced, after a number of weeks, when the main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew his challenge to the announced results. To the huge relief of the U.S. authorities in the country, that meant they, NATO, and the U.N. would not have to go through the enormous bother of organizing a run-off election. And Hamid Karzai was rapidly reinaugurated as president.

I’ve seen no reports on what inducements Abdullah was offered to withdraw, but I’m assuming there must have been some big ones, supplied by someone.

In Iraq, the post-election controversies could, but may not, become equally polarizing. There, it looks so far (but still with only very preliminary numbers) as if PM Maliki’s State of Law will emerge as the bloc with the largest number of seats, but well short of a simple majority, and even further short of the two-thirds majority required for many significant steps in governing the country. Therefore– as in Israel!– even if there is no controversy over the counting of the votes, there may still be a lengthy period of post-results coalition-forming haggling.

That was kind of what happened in Iraq in 2006. And then, of course, those post-election tensions immediately became tied up with the eruption of brutally intense sectarianism that followed the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.

This time around, I am fairly strongly convinced– unlike some others in the antiwar movement here in the U.S.– that the U.S. authorities really do want to try to get the bulk of the military out of Iraq in accordance with the Withdrawal Agreement of November 2008. And to do this without the whole process being a debacle that would certainly destabilize the whole region, they need some form of “legitimate enough” government to emerge and start governing in Baghdad.

Just as, for slightly different reasons, they needed some form of “legitimate enough” government to emerge in Afghanistan last summer…

In the present global-political context, in which the U.S. has tied itself and much of the U.N. bureaucracy to the idea that western-style elections are an essential component (or source) of political legitimacy, having a “legitimate enough” government in a country under direct U.S. sway means that that government must emerge from elections that are also judged to be “legitimate enough”.

I earlier explored a few of the challenges involved in plucking “legitimacy” out of a severely challenged election with regard to the Afghan elections of 2004, here, and 2009, here.

It is not clear whether– or how– this may happen in Iraq. We need to stay attuned to the fall-out that can be expected throughout the whole region if the post-election political challenges there cannot be speedily and satisfactorily resolved.

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Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports in Arabic that the Independent High Electoral Commission in Iraq has released some information on the performance of the major political coalitions in two southern Shiite provinces, based on a count so far of about a third of the vote.

The big news is that prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition defeated the alliance of other Shiite religious parties even in the pious provinces of Najaf and Babil. Since Shiites are 60% of the population, if this showing is repeated in Baghdad and in the South, Maliki would be in a good position to remain prime minister. He would likely have the biggest bloc in parliament, and would be asked to form the government.

The other possibility raised by the initial results is that Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya list is turning into a party for secular Sunnis, the majority in that community. But since Sunni Arabs are perhaps 18% of the population, that base will not carry Allawi into the prime minister’s mansion. Based on these partial results from five provinces, some press reports are putting al-Maliki at 22% of seats and Maliki at 20%. But this closeness is illusory. At the moment, al-Maliki is way ahead if you extrapolate out the Shiite vote.

But al-Sharq al-Awsat says that there are reports that Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi Naitonal Congress and a candidate in the National Iraqi Alliance (which groups the Shiite religious parties) attempted to enter a hall where the electoral commission was counting the votes and was turned away. Likewise, there was allegedly an attempt by a member of the State of Law coalition of al-Maliki to enter false data. The combination of Chalabi’s presence in the building and the continued postponement of the announcement of results based on partial counts of the votes has raised questions in the minds of some as to whether the election results are being tampered with.

WaPo reports some of the preliminary results announced Thursday, based on counts of from 17% to 30% of the votes in 5 provinces. In two southern Shiite provinces, this was the leading party:

Babil: State of Law (Nuri al-Maliki) 42%
Najaf: State of Law 47%

In contrast, the State of Law received 16% in Najaf in the provincial elections of early 2009, and 12.5% in Babil. These religious Shiite populations seem to be forsaking the National Iraqi Alliance of fundamentalist, generally pro-Iran parties.

The Iraqi National Alliance (Shiite fundamentalist parties) came in second in both provinces, with Iyad Allawi’s secular-leaning National Iraqi List coming in third.

In Diyala and Salahuddin, Sunni-majority provinces, Alawi’s National Iraqi List came in first, with al-Maliki trailing.

End/ (Not Continued)

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It’s Tom Friedman, at it once again in today’s NYT!

Here we are now, almost exactly fourteen Friedman Units (F.U.’s) after George W. Bush’s (heavily Friedman-supported) invasion of Iraq, and the arrogant and over-rated “Sage of Bethesda” is now telling us that the decidedly mixed, and violence-plagued picture of what happened on Sunday’s election day in Iraq was unequivocally “a very good day for Iraq.”

Friedman completely omits to mention the big role that his own writings (and those of many NYT colleagues) played in 2002, in building up the nationwide constituency for the war. Instead, he just notes archly that,

Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out.

That is, of course, also GWB’s own, famously self-exculpating line about the war.

And the Sage of Bethesda (SOB) doesn’t fail to give us one of his frequent little, faux-intimate verbal sparring matches with a world leader… In this case, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, to whom Tom addresses the following:

How are you feeling today? Yes, I am sure you have your proxies in Iraq. But I am also sure you know what some of your people are quietly saying: “How come we Iranian-Persian-Shiites — who always viewed ourselves as superior to Iraqi-Arab-Shiites — can only vote for a handful of pre-chewed, pre-digested, ‘approved’ candidates from the supreme leader, while those lowly Iraqi Shiites, who have been hanging around with America for seven years, get to vote for whomever they want?” Unlike in Tehran, Iraqis actually count the votes. This will subtly fuel the discontent in Iran…

Oh my goodness. Do you think the SOB ever actually reads the news from Iraq where, as we know, Ahmed Chalabi’s extremely anti-democratic “Justice and Accountability Commission” intervened on Saturday to suddenly, on the eve of the election, disqualify 55 candidates– additional to the hundreds it had already disqualified, earlier on during the election campaign?

Chalabi is far from being a neutral figure in the election, since he’s running as a member of the Iraqi National Alliance, the Iran-backed list of mainly Shiite politicians.

So those 55 suddenly banned candidates– all of whom were affiliated with other blocs, mainly the Iraqiyya bloc headed by Ayad Allawi– still had their names on the ballots on Sunday; and thus not only were they subjected to last-minute banning, but in addition everyone who voted for them suddenly had their votes rendered essentially meaningless.

As the WaPo’s Ernesto London and Leila Fadel report from Baghdad today,

If the votes for the newly barred candidates are annulled, it could give the Iraqiya coalition powerful ammunition to allege vote-rigging by rival politicians, including some in the Shiite-led camp of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“It will be a very violent reaction,” Allawi said in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of violence will take place, and God knows how this will end. I will tell you there is already an existing feeling that there was widespread rigging and widespread intimidation.”

And it’s not just those 55 suddenly-banned candidates and those who voted for them who’re at risk of having their political rights suddenly stripped from them. Londono and Fadel report that,

Faraj al-Haidary, chairman of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission, said Tuesday night that … under Iraqi law, the Justice and Accountability Commission could theoretically bar more candidates in the days ahead if it submits paperwork before the electoral board certifies them as lawmakers.

Ah, but my friend Tom, sitting in Bethesda, can assure us that Iraqis “get to vote for whomever they want”?

The WaPo journos also write about our friend the Iraq specialist Reidar Visser that he,

said the last-minute disqualification of candidates poses significant challenges for the electoral commission. Because Iraqis were able to choose individual candidates in the elections — as opposed to voting for slates that distribute the seats — disqualifying elected candidates could enrage voters.

“This could create a major problem for the whole process,” Visser said. “We have seen that there is no legal framework to deal with these eventualities, so they’re creating the framework as they proceed.”

So the post-election period in Iraq this time might well be– just as it was after the last national election, in December 2005– very messy, long-drawn-out and quite possibly even, as Allawi warned, violent.

So please let’s not sing any paens to the triumph of “democracy” in Iraq yet. (As Newsweek did last week, and as far too many other stalwarts of the US MSM seem to have been doing this week, too.)

George Bush’s hastily cobbled-together, back-up main “justification” for invading Iraq in 2003, remember, was– once he finally realized the “WMD justification” was a crock of nonsense– that the US occupation liberation of Iraq would usher in a new era of democratic, accountable, and successful government that would immediately become a model for the striving peoples of the whole of the rest of the region…

(Kind of like what the SOB was still arguing in his mendacious piece today.)

But in the aftermath of Iraq’s December 2005 election, the country was plunged into deeper sectarianism and social collapse than it had ever before experienced, and for roughly 18 months thereafter the violence and heartbreak continued unabated, sending streams of extremely distressed Iraqis fleeing for their lives.

Electoral “democracy”, it turned out, was not a “model” that anyone anywhere else in the region wanted to emulate, at all. (In the OPTs, interestingly, all the major political forces did continue with their plans to hold an OPTs-wide parliamentary election just six weeks after that Iraqi election, in January 2006. Washington’s ferocious response to the results of that election gave the lie to any lingering idea anyone might have had that George W. Bush really did have any gut sympathy for the norms and principles of democratic self-governance… )

And, contra to what the SOB is now telling us, I certainly don’t think anyone in the Middle East, whether Iranians, Arabs, Turks, Israelis, or anyone else, is sitting on the edge of their chairs thinking that the 2010 election in Iraq is going to usher in a fabulous period of successful, democratic self-governance in Iraq. The most that anyone is able to hope for, really, is that despite the machinations of Ahmed Chalabi and his gang– the ones who got us into the war and occupation in the first place, remember, along with Bush and Cheney– Iraq’s conflict-battered people may somehow find a governance system that works for them and allows them to rebuild a society that has been torn apart by two decades, now, of extremely vindictive, lethal, politicidal, and arrogant western policy toward their country.

How Iraq’s citizenry decide to govern themselves is completely up to them. For Tom Friedman or anyone else to claim they know what should happen is imperialist arrogance of the most outdated and destructive kind.

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WRAP: Key estimates from Baghdad region, which could swing results of Sunday’s poll, not yet available.
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