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The pan-Arab London daily al-Hayat [Life] reports in Arabic that sources close to the two major Shiite coalitions have revealed that they will form a 10-person committee of “wise men” to choose the country’s prime minister.

The “wise men” will consist of or include prominent Shiite clerics chosen by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shiites, according to AP.

The move comes in the wake of the sudden announcement the night before last that the Iraqi National Alliance (Sadrists, Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, some others) and the State of Law (Islamic Mission Party or Da’wa and some others) will form a broad coalition. The step gives them a combined tally of 159 of 325 seats in parliament, only 4 short of the 51% required to form a government on the second ballot and then to rule effectively. Likely they will nevertheless seek to form a government of national unity.

The secular Iraqiya list, for which most Sunni Arabs voted denounced the move as having been orchestrated by Iran and returning Iraq to the sway of sectarian religious parties. But Iraqiya failed to form a government in its own right in part because of frictions between Sunni Arabs in the North and Kurds in the East, over the division of spoils.

The Shiite religious parties denied that they had already fixed on former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who was widely viewed as ineffectual in 2005-2006. Still, the announcement of the new coalition was made in Jaafari’s house in Baghdad, which is unlikely to be completely without significance.

The clerical committee will choose among Ibrahim Jaafari, Adil Abdul Mahdi (current vice president and member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq), Baqir Jabr and incumbent PM Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki is fiercely disliked by the Sadr Movement, which controls some 40 seats in the new parliament, because he deployed the Iraqi military against their Mahdi Army militiamen in 2008. Some major clerics in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala have also been extremely fierce critics of al-Maliki.

The Iraqi National Movement or Iraqiya, headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, denounced the Shiite super-coalition as a return to the bad old days of sectarian rule (i.e. 2005-2010) and said it was a move intended to exclude their party.

Still, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Ammar al-Hakim, insisted that it would not serve in any government that excluded any major party.

The communique from the new partners said, “An agreement has been reached on the formation of the largest parliamentary bloc, via the alliance of these two [Shiite religious] coalitions. This is a basic step intended to create an opening toward other national forces.”

Aljazeera English has video:

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Twin car bombs go off near a Shia holy site in the Iraqi city of Karbala, killing five and wounding scores more.
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The 40th day mourning ceremonies after the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn (the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) in 680 CE was marred by bombings in both Iraq and Pakistan. This violence on the terrain of sacred space and sacred time marked a regional low-intensity war between Shiite revivalists and Sunni vigilante extremists. In Iraq, the Shiites came to power in the wake of the US overthrow of the secular, Arab nationalist (and Sunni-tinged) regime of Saddam Hussein, and are being resisted by radical Sunni Arabs, whether religious or secular. In Pakistan, the Taliban in the northwest Pashtun areas are hyper-Sunni and have often attacked Shiites. The current president, Asaf Ali Zardari, is a nominal Shiite, and many Shiites support the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). It is the center-left PPP that has authorized massive military operations against the ultra-Sunni Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.

In Iraq, the Sunni radicals attacked pilgrims pouring into the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad, the site of Imam Husayn’s tomb. A car bomb blew up among a throng of pilgrims, and than they were subjected to a further mortar attack. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that as many as 41 persons were killed and about 150 wounded in the attacks, though exact statistics were hard to come by in the chaos. The atrocity came after a bomb killed 22 pilgrims on Tuesday.

According to al-Zaman, Shiite authorities claimed that “10 million” pilgrims had packed into the shrine city and environs over the past 5 days, 100,000 of them “Arabs and foreigners.” Personally, I don’t find an estimate of more than a million pilgrims for Arba’in (the 40th-day mourning ceremonies) plausible. During the official pilgrimage to Mecca, about 2 million persons come from all over the world. Moreover, Shiism is a minority branch of Islam, encompassing about 10%. And the 40th-day observations are not as central as Ashura, the day of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom.

In any case, Shiites in Karbala seemed more resigned than revengeful, according the anonymous NYT reporter in Karbala.

In the major southern port of Karachi in Pakistan, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a busfull of pilgrims went by, as well as attacking a hospital, killing 22. The guerrillas followed the wounded pilgrims to the hospital and attacked them again there. Karachi has been filled with sectarian tensions since early January.

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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Will Iraq's Oil Ever Flow? | TomDispatch

Sociologist Michael Schwartz, a sharp Iraq-watcher and author of a provocative book on the Iraq War, surveys the travails of Iraq’s oil industry since the 2003 Bush-Cheney invasion and points to the continued difficulties of the Iraq petroleum industry.

My own guess is that eventually the security situation will settle down enough to allow the foreign petroleum companies now signing bids to develop specific fields to press forward. It will be a long slow haul, but Iraqi petroleum will likely come online over time. When that expansion of production happens,it will have a big impact on Iraq. There will be massive internal migration of labor to the Basra and other oil-rich areas, mixing up Sunni Arabs and Kurds with regional labor migrants from e.g. Egypt, India and Pakistan.

The Neoconservative dreams that Iraq would rival or replace Saudi Arabia as swing producer, and that it would recognize and perhaps supply petroleum to Israel, however, are both unlikely developments. Moreover, as China, India and other Asian giants begin growing more rapidly and depending on automobiles, demand for petroleum could well grow so fast over the next twenty years that any new big fields’ production is just slurped up, with the world demanding more. That is, Rupert Murdoch’s notion that Iraq production could plunge prices down to $14 a barrel for the long term, helping industrialized economies, was always stupid, since it did not take account of rapidly growing demand from Asia.

The emergence of Iraq as a petroleum state (or rather a bigger, wealthier petroleum state) will also further upset the geopolitical balance in the Middle East. With a Shiite majority, it will offset Saudi Arabia in the Sunni-Shiite culture wars. It seems likely to have a big, well-trained and effective army, which cannot always be depended on to be allied with the interests of Washington. A military coup down the road cannot be ruled out (there are few democratic oil states, where petroleum supplies more than a third of the national income). And, it likely will be a friendly and supportive big brother to movements like Hizbullah in Lebanon. While it won’t always be on the same page as Iran, it will likely be an ally of and support for Tehran. One possibility is that a rich Iraq 20 or 25 years from now will be in a position to promote Twelver Shiism in the region, picking up some of the Alevis in Turkey, the Nusairis in Syria and the Zaidis in Yemen. With its possession of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, with the enormously influential chief cleric of Najaf as among its more prominent residents, Iraq’s soft power among Afghan, Pakistani and Indian Shiites has the potential for being greater than that of Iran.

In the end, an oil-rich, Shiite-dominated Iraq is far more likely to be a victory for the Shiite revival kicked off in 1979 by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini than a triumph for Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Pipes and the other hard line warmongers who advocated for a revolution-by-invasion in Iraq.

But Schwartz is correct that all these developments are likely a decade or more off.

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Suicide bombers kill at least 40 Shia pilgrims during a major ceremony in the Iraqi city of Karbala, police say.
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An explosion in the Iraqi city of Karbala kills at least 20 Shia pilgrims as they made their way to a religious festival.
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AFP Arabic reports that a female suicide bomber detonated her payload in a tent in northeast Baghdad (Bub al-Sham) among pilgrims walking to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing 56 and wounding 144 according to late reports. The pilgrimage commemorates the 40th day after the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the hands of the Umayyad Empire in 680 CE. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites are walking or driving toward Karbala, creating a security nightmare for Iraqi army and police intent on preventing Sunni Arab terrorist attacks on the pilgrims.

Along the way philanthropic groups have set up tents with food and drink. Since Husayn was said to have suffered from thirst as he and his family and friends were besieged by the armies of the Caliph Yazid, it is common for pious Shiites to put out water stalls. The suicide bomber is said to have entered such a tent for women pilgrims, which had Interior Ministry female security personnel within, patting people down. The attacker set off her bomb before she could be inspected, killing 3 inspectors along with many others in the tent.

AP has video:

Some 35,000 pilgrims have already reached Karbala in preparation for the 40-day mourning sessions there, about five days from now.

Aswat al-Iraq reports via PNA that the Iraq ministries of the interior, defense and health said Sunday that 196 non-insurgent Iraqis were killed in political violence in January, 135 of them civilians and the others police or soldiers. In addition, Iraqi security forces killed 54 armed militants and arrested 681 others. The total of wounded this January was 782, 620 of them civilians.

The civilian deaths declined 56% from December, when 306 civilians were killed. The death total was also a steep decline from January of 2009 when 376 Iraqis were killed. The number of wounded showed no change from January 2009.

The US military suffered 5 deaths in Iraq in January, but only 2 were the result of hostile action. In December, no US troops died in Iraq.

Sunni-Shiite violence has continued as part of the low-intensity conflict in post-Baath (and increasingly post-American) Iraq. Already raw nerves have been rubbed even more raw by the exclusion of over 500 candidates out of some 3000 from running for parliament. Those excluded include some candidates who presented forged credentials to he High Electoral Commission. But many were disqualified by the Accountability and Justice Committee on grounds of close connection to the banned Baath Party. Since the more prominent politicians so excluded were Sunni Arabs of a secular cast of mind, Sunni Arabs are particularly upset.

Salih Mutlak, the leader of the National Dialogue Bloc in parliament (11 seats), was among those excluded, and his appeal to the courts has failed. Sunni Awakening leader Ahmad Abu Risha, whose group went on the US payroll to fight Sunni radicals (“al-Qaeda”), is considering boycotting the March 7 parliamentary elections over the exclusions.

Tensions over the election are running so high that US ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill has publicly weighed in, warning about the danger to the credibility of the elections of excluding high-profile Sunni Arabs.

One menace is that Sunni boycotts or noncooperation could complicate the process of forming a new government after the early March elections.

Tensions also remain high between Arabs and Kurds in the north, where the US is jointly patrolling with Iraqi and Kurdish paramilitary forces.

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AP reports that guerrillas drove a car bomb into an Interior Ministry crime lab in the Karrada district of Baghdad on Tuesday, only a day after a coordinated bombing attack on the city’s hotel district, killing 22.

Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. Many Iraqi politicians live in Karrada, an upscale Shiite neighborhood. Haydar al-Jurani, a member of parliament in the Islamic Mission Party (Hizb al-Da’wa) to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki belongs, was walking near the building and was taken to hospital with a mild head wound.

If the attacks were meant to demoralize, they seem to be succeeding. Al-Zaman reports that many in Baghdad blame the security forces for either being incompetent, or for being actively complicit (e.g. taking bribes to allow cars through checkpoints) in the bombings.

The crime lab, which had been recently renovated with American aid funds, was almost completely destroyed. Obviously, a terrorist group would want to disrupt the forensics capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.

The Australian Broadcasting Co. has a video report:

AP’s Brian Murphy also quotes Gen. Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, to the effect that the explosives used in the past two days appear to have been less powerful than in the August and December attacks, but that guerrillas have developed new tactics– having an armed band shoot it out with building security forces, e.g., clearing the way for a car bomb to be driven into the building. The US military suspects that there are bomb-making factories in the semi-rural areas just outside Baghdad, from which the payloads are driven into the capital. The guerrillas’ strategy has also shifted, Odierno, said, from a attempt to mount a popular insurgency to overwhelm the capital [in 2004-2005] to a rearguard set of small terrorist actions aimed at destabilizing the Shiite-dominated government. [Cole would add that the reason for this shift is that the Sunni Arabs have been largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so that it is no longer plausible for them to take over the capital using their old demographic base in e.g. al-Mansur. Thus the spoiler actions of bombing downtown buildings, which cannot change the government but can keep it weak.]

Muhammad A. Salih reports for IPS that the Accountability and Justice Commission, which excluded some 500 candidates from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, may be softening. It recently reinstated 59 candidates. The ostensible reason given for the exclusions was that the candidates were too closely linked to the banned Baath Party. But among those excluded was Salih al-Mutlak, who had sat in parliament as leader of the 11-seat National Dialogue Bloc and who had left the Baath Party in 1977. I am quoted saying that this move by the committee comes as too little, too late, and that the goal of the exclusions seems to be to make sure that the Shiite religious parties retain control of parliament, whichthey have had since January 2005.

Carnegie has a good overview of the politics of the exclusions. The authors maintain that Shiite ex-Baaithists were also banned, and that most of the 500 were minor political figures, but that the more prominent of them were Sunni Arabs, creating an impression of sectarian bias. The head of the Commission is a fundamentalist Shiite also running for parliament, a situation many have decried as inherently unfair.

The next big security challenge comes this weekend, with the advent of the 40th day commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at his shrine in the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad. Some 20,000 army troops, police and other security men have been positioned through the city to forestall bombings of the pilgrims or the shrine, which would have the potential to throw Iraq back into intense ethno-sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Pilgrims are being forbidden to wear burial shrouds, which some do to symbolize their willingness to be martyred along with Imam Husayn for the truth. I suppose authorities feel that the loose shrouds could too easily hide a belt bomb.

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Laura Rosen has this in POLITICO/ here

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