Arab News Blog

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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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.

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A car bomb in Iraq’s holy city of Najaf kills at least three people on the eve of tense parliamentary elections, officials say.
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On Wednesday morning, three suicide bombers attacked the HQ of the provincial government, a police station, and a hospital in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province east of Baghdad, killing at least 16 persons and wounding over 40. (The report of the explosion at the government building comes via Aljazeera Arabic.) The attack was probably undertaken by militant Sunni Arabs intent on creating an atmosphere of fear intended to keep voters home on the coming Sunday.

Diyala is a mixed province with a slight Sunni Arab majority. The Shiite minority, however, dominated its politics from 2003-2008, possibly with help from neighboring Iran. In response, Sunni Arabs launched a determined insurgency, making Diyala one of the more dangerous provinces in the country.

In January 2009, a Sunni Arab-dominated provincial council came to power. In the aftermath, however, arrest warrants were issued by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad for several provincial council members, who were suspected of links to insurgent guerrilla groups, and who had to go into hiding. The police and military in Baquba are disproportionately Shiite, which is one of the reasons the Sunni Arab guerrillas would have attacked them.

On February 26, a forum participant had posted a statement attributed to an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the radical Sunni Arab ‘Islamic State of Iraq,’ which ridiculed Iraq’s elections. Translated by the USG Open Source Center, it said,

‘” The Islamic State in Iraq Will Participate in the Iraqi Elections, using their own methods. They (the Islamic State in Iraq) have picked several apostate figures that its soldiers will vote for, either with an explosive device or an explosive belt, God willing.

“The Initial Results of Elections According to Jihadist Sources

“The Ministry of War of the Islamic State of Iraq has won first place in the jihadist elections in the Land of the Two Rivers, and destroyed most of the election posts.

” The Electoral Program of the Al-Qa’ida Organization

“1- Purifying and liberating the land of the caliphate (governing system) from the Crusaders and applying God’s Shari’ah [religious law] in the Land of the Two Rivers.

“2- Establishing an Islamic state and getting rid of the legislators and legislative councils based on infidel democracy.

“3- Expanding the field of jihadist work to liberate Muslim countries from occupation, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque[in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem], the cradle of prophets and messengers, and purifying it of the cowardly Zionists, following in the steps of Salah al-Din [Saladin].

“4- Applying God’s Shari’ah on Earth, establishing an Islamic caliphate, and unifying the Muslim point of view under the banner of monotheism and jihad.’

Opinion polling shows that only a tiny minority of Iraqi Sunni Arabs find these ideas attractive, and support for them has fallen dramatically in recent years.

As though a resurgence of Sunni Arab radicalism were not enough, the Associated Press has gotten hold of a warrant issued by Iraq’s Supreme Court for the arrest of Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr, dated February 7 of this year. The surprise renewal of the warrant, originally issued under the American administration of Paul Bremer in 2004, threatens to roil Iraq. Sadr stands accused of ordering the killing of Majid al-Khoei on April 10, 2003, on the latter’s return to the holy city of Najaf from exile in London. Al-Khoei was killed by enraged mobs of nativist Sadr followers in part because his return seemed to have been sponsored by London and Washington, D.C. That the death was an assassination ordered by al-Sadr as opposed to the spiralling out of control of an urban mob has not been proven.

The American-inspired arrest warrant was allowed to lapse as part of the Bush administration’s truce with the Shiite leader. His Sadr Movement came to be a significant player in parliament, with over 10% of the seats, and his Mahdi Army militia was at one point in control of significant swathes of southern Iraqi cities as well as the capital. The Sadr Movement is part of the National Iraqi Alliance, which groups several important Shiite religious parties, and which seems set to gain between a sixth and a fifth of seats in the parliamentary elections scheduled for the coming Sunday.

The al-Maliki government denied that it had engineered the reemergence of the arrest warrant, and indeed denied that the warrant existed.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement blamed al-Maliki for the issuance of the warrant and called it ‘psychological warfare’ against the Sadr Movement.

There is now certainly a suspicious pattern whereby the major challengers to al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition have run into sudden and unexpected legal problems in the run-up to the election. Salih Mutlak, a Sunni Arab ally of Iyad Allawi’s National Iraqi List, was disqualified from running on grounds that he was too close to the banned Baath Party that had been led by Saddam Hussein. The move potentially weakened the Iraqiya List.

Now the National Iraqi Alliance is being targeted for demoralization, with one of its chief leaders indicted anew on a 6-year-old charge that had seemed to lapse. Ironically, the Sadr Movement’s support had catapulted PM al-Maliki into power in spring of 2006, before the two broke with one another in summer 2007 over al-Maliki’s unwillingness to set a timetable for US withdrawal and to cease teleconferencing with President George W. Bush.

Iraqis point out that few major Iraqi politicians have clean hands, as McClatchy reports.

The greatest danger of these political maneuverings is that they may reignite guerrilla and militia violence in Iraq, and possibly impede the scheduled withdrawal of the US military. Both Sunni Arab guerrillas and Mahdi Army militiamen have been major sources of instability in Iraq at some points in the past six years. Some Sunni Arabs are worried about a resurgence of sectarian violence.

On the other hand, experienced Iraq hand Nir Rosen believes that all the talk about the reemergence of sectarian conflict is completely overblown. One reason Rosen may be right is that the Sunni Arabs decisively lost the civil war and were largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so it is not clear that they have the social base to put up a further fight.

Aljazeera English reports on the campaign techniques being used in Iraq:

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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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Hundreds of Shi’ites stage demonstrations in Najaf, Basra in support to bar candidates linked to Saddam.
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Local govt officials warn late dictator’s loyalists to move out of Shi’ite province Najaf or face ‘iron fist’.
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Three bombs were set off in the old city of Najaf, among the holiest of Shiite sacred sites on Thursday afternoon, according to DPA. The casualty count is confused, but up to 27 were killed and up to 111 wounded according to this source. The incident comes at a time of renewed Sunni-Shiite tension that could have implications for the Obama administration’s withdrawal timetable from Iraq.

Al-Fayha reports in Arabic that one of the car bombs went off near a Husayniya or Shiite religious center, whereas the other two hit the wholesale market. Banat al-Hasan St. is mentioned in some reports.

The frightening thing is that the bombs exploded near the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, who is the first Shiite Imam or divinely-appointed leader of Islam (Sunnis consider him the fourth orthodox caliph). For Shiites, the shrine of Ali is like the Basilica of St. Peter for Roman Catholics. We saw what happened when Sunni guerrillas blew up the Askariya Shrine that serves as the tomb of the 10th and 11th Imams in Samarra in 2006– it kicked off a massive Sunni-Shiite bloodbath.

Najaf inhabitants expressed consternation and bewilderment that car bombs could have been allowed into the old city by the Najaf police, who are normally now vigilant against such attempts.

The government, as usual, blamed Baathists (followers of the old regime of Saddam Hussein overthrown by the Bush administration in 2003) or Sunni religious extremists (radical Salafis or ‘al-Qaeda’) for the bombings.

The blast comes at a time of mounting political tension ahead of the March parliamentary elections. The High Electoral Committee on Thursday disqualified a further 500 candidates and political lists from running on March 7. Just a few days ago, it disqualified 14. Most Sunni Arab Iraqis living under the Baath regime from 1968-2003 had some connection to the Baath government, of only via a cousin, and so did many Shiites (half of the middle and lower-level Baath functionaries in the 1980s were Shiites).

Among the more prominent of those barred is Saleh Mutlak, head of the National Dialogue Front, a small secular Arab nationalist party that has sat in parliament and not been known for being disruptive. Norwegian historian Reidar Vissar, an expert on southern Iraq, referred to this development as a ‘complete system failure’ in Iraq’s development as a parliamentary system.

Sunni Arab Iraqis are furious about the move, which is seen as promoted behind the scenes by Iran. If the goal of this final year of American military occupation was to achieve communal reconciliation among Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, then these disqualifications are a big step back and raise Sunni-Shiite tensions.

Mutlak will appeal the ruling to a seven-judge panel. If it is not overturned, his small party (11 seats in parliament) and the coalition of which it is a part, the Iraqi National Movement, may boycott the elections. The Iraqi National List, headed by former appointed PM Ayad Allawi (25 seats in parliament) is also part of the INM coalition, and groups secular Sunnis along with some secular-minded Shiites. Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi is also part of this coalition, despite being on the Sunni religious right.

On Thursday, 300 Sunnis came out to demonstrate in Ramadi north of Baghdad, and there were rallies in some other Sunni-majority cities. A Sunni boycott would weaken the legitimacy of the resulting elected government. Since the provinces now function as electoral districts, however, a boycott would not stop Sunnis from being elected. It is just that whoever is elected from Sunni-majority provinces such as al-Anbar and Salahuddin would not be very representative of the electorate. In a mixed province such as Diyala, if the Sunnis boycotted then most MPs will be Shiite, which would affect the sectarian balance of power in parliament.

Mutlak says he is confident that his appeal will be successful..

The remaining 110,000 US troops in Iraq seldom do patrols and seldom see combat any more (none were killed in hostile action in December). Their main task is to lock down the country so that the March 7 election can be held without horrific car bombings (Iraqis just have to walk everywhere for three days). Once the election is held, the withdrawal of troops will accelerate, and all but 50,000 should be out by the end of August. These 50,000 will not be combat troops but rather trainers and providers of logistical support to the Iraqi military.

A further round of violence between Sunnis and Shiites over what Sunnis will claim is a stolen election fostered by an unfair vetting process could complicate the US withdrawal.

The Shiite government does not control northern Sunni cities such as Mosul (pop. 1.7 million), which are armed and devoted to the Arab nationalist principles now being dismissed as ‘Baathist’ by the fundamentalist Shiites who control the government.

The conflicts between the Kurds and the Arabs in the north have still also not been settled by negotiation, and they could easily flare into violence.

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AP/ here

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Councillors in Iraq’s most revered holy Shii’te city of Najaf ban sale and consumption of alcohol.
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