Arab News Blog

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”

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The USG Open Source Center translates a guide to the main party coalitions in the March 7 elections in Iraq

Report Lists Main Iraqi Alliances Contesting Parliamentary Elections
Unattributed report: “List of [Iraqi] Political Alliances Before 2010 Elections”
Al-Hayah Online
Friday, March 5, 2010
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Baghdad, Al-Hayah – . . .

The [Iraqi National Alliance] was announced on 24 August 2009 and includes 11 political entities, among them the most important Shiite parties which are the “…Islamic Supreme Council [of Iraq]” [ISCI}, "Badr Organization" [paramilitary of ISCI, organized to contest for vote], “Al-Sadr Trend”, “[Islamic Virtue] Al-Fadilah Party”, “Al-Da’wah Party-Iraq Organization”, “National Reform Trend” (Ibrahim al-Ja’fari), “Iraqi National Congress” (Ahmad Chalabi), Ibrahim Bahr-al-Ulum, and “Al-Wasat Trend” led by Muwaffaq al-Rubay’i in addition to Sunni forces, among them the “Muslim Ulema Group”, “Al-Anbar Salvation Council”, and liberal, secular and independent figures.

The [INA] is considered the main rival to the [State of Law] “SOL” which is led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The [ISCI] and “Al-Sadr Trend” are hoping to regain some of the Shiite votes they had lost to Al-Maliki in the governorates councils’ elections last year. There are also speculations that the [INA] might forge an alliance with Al-Maliki’s alliance after the elections in case none of them obtains enough seats that allow it to form a government on its own. The “State of Law Coalition”

The “SOL” whose establishment was announced by Al-Maliki in October 2009 includes 50 political entities and a number of political and tribal figures, the most prominent of which are “Al-Da’wah Party General Headquarters” led by Al-Maliki, the “Islamic Turkoman Union” led by Deputy Abbas al-Bayyati, the “Mustaqillun [Independents'] Bloc” led by Oil Minister Husayn al-Shahrastani, and other groups which include some leaders of Sunni tribes, Christians, and independents. “SOL” was the biggest winner in the governorates councils’ elections in January 2009 after raising the slogan of imposing security, providing services, and establishing a strong central government. Al- Maliki considers his victory in the legislative elections “a certainty” with more votes than his rivals but he announced that he would be compelled to conclude alliances with other forces if he did not win a majority (163 seats) to form a government.

The “Iraqi National Movement”: This list includes the “National Accord Movement” which was announced on 31 October 2009 under Iyad Allawi, the “Iraqi Front for National Dialogue” led by Salih al-Mutlak (the two movement’s merger), Deputy Adnan Pachachi who is the former leader of the “Independent Democrats Grouping”, and Salam al-Zawba’i, the deputy prime minister who had resigned. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister (title as published) Tariq al-Hashimi announced on 28 October 2009 that his “Tajdid” movement joined the “INM” which is seeking to contest the elections on the basis of a nationalist program.

The “INM” came under heavy pressures. The “Accountability and Justice Commission” banned some of its symbolic figures, most notably Salih al-Mutlak and Zafir al-Ani, from participating in the elections and the movement considered this an act of revenge and unconstitutional. Al-Mutlak announced his party would not contest the elections to protest his exclusion but later rescinded the decision and announced it would participate. The “Iraqi Unity Movement”

It was announced on 21 November 2009 and includes around 26 political entities and various secular and Islamic forces and technocrats. The most prominent of them is Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani, “Iraqi Al-Sahwah Council” leader Ahmad Abu-Rishah, the “Charter Grouping” led by Sunni Emoluments Council Chairman Shaykh Ahmad Abd-al-Ghafur al-Samarra’i, former Defense Minister Sa’dun al-Dulaymi, and “Iraqi Republican Grouping” led by Sa’d Asim al-Janabi.

Previous leaks pointed to understandings between Al-Bulani, Abu-Rishah, and Samarra’i with “INM” leaders Iyad Allawi, Tariq al-Hashimi, and Salih al-Mutlak in addition to former parliament Speaker Mahmud al-Mashhadani to form a large political front. But the widening of the front and disagreements over its leadership apparently aborted the idea in its cradle. The Kurds

Four main Kurdish lists are competing in the elections. The two main Kurdish parties which control the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq dominate the “Kurdish Alliance.” These are the “Kurdistan Democratic Party” led by Kurdish Prime Minister Mas’ud Barzani and the “Patriotic Union of Kurdistan” led by President Jalal Talabani. The two parties underline the Kurdish nationality and have strong relations with the West.

The two parties’ grip on the Kurdistan Region weakened before the “Change Bloc” led by Nushiran Mustafa who had split from Talabani and which called for reforms. It scored good results in last year’s Kurdish parliamentary elections and will contest this one alone. There is a fourth list, which is the “Islamic Kurdish Union” in addition to the “Islamic Group.”

Less important forces are contesting the elections, such as the Communist Party and the “National Unity Alliance” which includes a group of entities, most notably the “National Dialogue Council” led by Khalaf al-Alayan, “Asla” led by Fadil al-Maliki, “Ansar al-Risalah” led by Mazin Makkiyah, and the liberal “Al-Ahrar” led by Deputy Iyad Jamal-al-Din. The Tribal Chiefs

Tribal chiefs play an important role in the elections and the main parties are seeking to curry their favor. Some leaders of Sunni tribes became prominent when the US forces started to back the “Awakening Councils” against “Al-Qa’ida” gunmen in 2006. Though the prominent tribal figures were eager to engage in political activity, they did not however establish a united front but joined existing blocs. The minorities

Iraq’s smaller minorities in Iraq include the Turkoman, Christians, Yazidis, Sabians, and Al-Shabak. They are allied to larger electoral lists in areas they do not dominate.

(Description of Source: London Al-Hayah Online in Arabic — Website of influential Saudi-owned London pan-Arab daily…)

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Iraqis go to the voting booth a week from today, on Sunday, March 7, to elect the second full-term parliament (4 years) since the fall of the one-party Baath regime in 2003. Given the turmoil surrounding last summer’s elections in Iran and Afghanistan, with massive vote fraud and stolen elections being alleged in both, many Iraqis are worried ballot and other irregularities in their polls, as well.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement is complaining bitterly about a rash of arrests by the government of Sadrist activists. The hard line Shiite movement asserted that these arrests were aimed at influencing the course of the election.

Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that the National Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shiite religious parties, has alleged that there are 800,000 imaginary voters’ names on the election rolls. Member of parliament for the National Iraqi Alliance, Qasim Da’ud, told al-Hayat that his coalition has already detected numerous instances of attempted fraud in the upcoming election. He said that there is evidence that the Independent High Electoral Commission has come under undue pressure in this regard.

Da’ud was speaking in a roundabout way about Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in making these charges. He went further, asserting that the sitting government had begun acting improperly given the closeness of the election date, with the prime minister misusing his position for electoral purposes. Da’ud said al-Maliki had distributed land and gifts to tribal sheikhs and citizens. He had also decided to purge some military officers and pardon others. Da’ud said that the most brazen such move was the addition of 800,000 imaginary names to the voting rolls just days before the election.

(With regard to the purging and reinstatement of military officers, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced late this week that 20,000 Saddam-era officers in the Baath army would be reinstated (most are at the rank of colonel or below). Critics maintain that al-Maliki is trying for the Sunni vote with this move.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s website for Friday carried the sermon of Sadrist preacher Shaykh Abd-al-Hadi al-Muhammadawi, who also complained about al-Maliki’s gifts in his Friday prayer sermon, referring to an account that al-Maliki gave out pistols to tribal sheikhs who visited him, to curry their favor (USG Open Source Center translation): “His Eminence wondered: Where from did the prime minister bring money to distribute pistols to some chieftains? These are the methods of the destroyer Saddam. Where are the state’s fund? What did Operation Knights Assault and the operations of the so-called Law Enforcement Plan achieve? What are the results of investigations on the crime of the Al-Ummah Bridge and the bloody Wednesday, Sunday, and Tuesday? What is the fate of the corrupt ones, particularly the ministers who have stolen the state’s funds? Where is the wronged people’s share from the ration card’s items?”

Back to the al-Hayat article: The Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said it is worried about massive fraud in the election, given that, it alleged, the Independent High Electoral Commission had printed up an extra seven million ballots. The party dismissed the explanation that the Commission had had to print more ballots because the originals did not meet international criteria.

In al-Anbar Province, Ahmad Abu Risha is a leader of the ‘Awakening Councils’ or ‘Sons of Iraq’ movement, wherein Sunni Arabs took money from the US to fight radical Muslim extremists such as the ‘Islamic State of Iraq.’ He is now part of the Unity of Iraq coalition led by Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani. He said that the Committee of Justice and Accountability’s disqualification of some 500 candidates out of over 6000 was itself a reason to suspect that some political parties intend to commit ballot fraud.

The Independent High Electoral Commission issued a statement denying the validity of the charges and calling them “inexcusable” and “detached from reality.”

Meanwhile, The Eye Network dedicated to observing the elections has expressed its fears of ballot fraud in the votes cast by Iraqi expatriates. There are about a million Iraqis in Syria, and a couple hundred thousand in Jordan, with perhaps 50,000 each in Egypt and Lebanon, as well as about 40,000 in Sweden and a few thousands in other countries. (These figures are based on my own research and that of specialists who have presented at conferences I’ve attended; the numbers are much exaggerated in the press for both Jordan and Egypt). The Eye Network says it is precisely the unknown number of voters abroad and the lack of authenticated voter rolls that makes fraud so potentially easy in this regard.

Thre are also fears of undue religious interference. Last week the Pakistani Shiite grand ayatollah in Najaf, Bashir al-Najafi, implicitly denounced several of al-Maliki’s cabinet members, some of them running on his State of Law ticket for corruption and incompetence (criticizing the provision of services such as electricity and water).

Apparently as a reaction to this intervention, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who outranks al-Najafi, reaffirmed the neutrality of the great Shiite clerics in this election. Sistani also announced that he would not meet with any further candidates in the week before the election.

The USG Open Source Center translated the second Friday prayer sermon of Sistani representative Abd al-Mahdi Karbala’i:

‘ 26 February 2010, His Eminence Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, representative of the Higher Religious Authority, said: “Higher Religious Authority His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, may God maintain his shadow, has warned of the refusal to participate in the coming elections. He said that this is because the citizen’s refusal to participate in the elections will give a chance to others who reject the democratic way of transferring power and running the country’s affairs and who take violence and illegitimate ways as a means to change the situation, to assume power, and impose their policy on the others. He said that this would involve the country in a whirlpool of chaos and continuous instability.

“He pointed out: So as to foil the plans of these sides and in order to prevent them from taking Iraq back to square one, everyone should participate in the elections. All this is in order to consolidate and entrench the democratic way of the rotation of power and to take the country far from the ghost of violence and military coups. If the citizens refuse to participate in the elections, a day will come when they will regret this strongly, but after it is too late.” ‘

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Al-Hayat [Life] reports via AFP Arabic on the poll just released by the National Media Center, which reports to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office. According to this sounding, the major coalitions will perform thusly in the March 7 parliamentary elections (rounding up to the nearest whole number):

State of Law (Nuri al-Maliki): 30%
Iraqi National Movement (Iyad Allawi): 22%
National Iraqi Alliance (Ammar al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr): 17%
Kurdistan Alliance (Jalal Talibani and Massoud Barzani): 10%
Unity of Iraq (Jawad al-Bulani): 5%
Iraqi Accord Front (Iyad al-Samarraie): 3%
No Opinion: 5%

(State of Law: Shiite religious/ nationalist coalition of the current prime minister; Iraqi National Movement: coalition of secular Shiite and Sunni parties led by a former interim prime minister; National Iraqi Alliance: coalition of Shiite religious parties, including Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq; Kurdistan Alliance: The major but not the only Kurdish political force; Unity of Iraq: party of Interior Minister, an independent Shiite; Iraqi Accord Front: Coalition of Sunni fundamentalist parties.)

The other 8% must be for small, probably Sunni Arab or Kurdish, parties not so far detailed by the Arabic press.

There are strange things about this poll. First, it gives the major Kurdish coalition only 10%. The Kurdistan Alliance got 21% in December, 2005, or 53 seats. It is true that the Kurds lost out in the expansion of the number of seats in parliament, insofar as they have only had 43 seats set aside for the Kurdistan superprovince, or 13%. But Kurds in the mixed provinces of Kirkuk, Diyala and Ninevah should return some seats for the Kurdistan Alliance or one of its challengers. Moreover, there is no reason for a weighted poll to reflect seat apportionment. This poll is missing half the Kurds who should have turned up in it, and they can’t all be in the 8% that wasn’t detailed. That gap is a major flaw.

Second, the Sunni Arab parties have also disappeared. The Iraqi Accord Front gained 44 seats or 15% in December, 2005, and the National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak won 11 seats or 4%. So Sunni Arab parties should also have shown up as nearly 20 percent of the poll results. Instead the IAF has been reduced to 2.6%, and no other Sunni Arab parties are mentioned, though some might be in the unannounced 8%. That poor black hole of 8% cannot magically cover both the missing Sunni Arabs and the missing Kurds. Some proportion of the missing Sunni Arabs may be supporters of Allawi’s National Iraqi List, but can that possibility really account for this anomaly? A lot of Sunni Arabs have not forgiven Allawi for cheerleading the US military’s invasion of and virtual destruction of Fallujah in late fall of 2004.

It is true that Allawi went to visit Saudi Arabia recently in hopes of receiving King Abdullah’s backing as the secular alternative to the pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties. And his coalition partner Tariq al-Hashimi is in Cairo, seeking Egypt’s backing. Al-Hashimi was constrained to deny that the National Iraqi coalition had sent an envoy to Tehran seeking Iran’s acquiescence in Allawi’s return as prime minister, because just such a rumor was flying around Iraq. The visits to Riyadh and Cairo are intended to position the Iraqiya as the secular, Sunni-Shiite alternative to rule by religious Shiites linked to the ayatollahs in Tehran. It is a message that will resonate in the Sunni Arab provinces.

I conclude that somehow this poll over-represented the Shiite Arabs at the expense of Kurds and Sunni Arabs. The National Media Center maintains that they polled in a weighted way in all 18 provinces, so its results should be proportional. But they clearly are not.

If we focus on the Shiite parties, the results make some sense in the light of the provincial elections of January, 2009, when Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law coaltion (the core of which is his Islamic Mission (Da’wa) Party) took over a third of seats in the major urban centers of Baghdad and Basra, and did well in the Shiite provinces of the south, though not so overwhelmingly well.

In last year’s provincial elections, the Shiite fundamentalist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the core of today’s National Iraqi Alliance, virtually collapsed after having been dominant since 2005–though it still gained between 8% and 17% of the vote. The party suffered from an anti-incumbent mood, given poor services and bad security, as well as, allegedly, public distaste at how close it is to Iran. On the other hand, the hard line Sadr Movement, another constituent of the National Iraqi Alliance, did respectably in much of the Shiite South, gaining as much as 15-17% in some provinces. So the non-Da’wa Shiite religious parties could well gain as much as a fifth of the national vote if the trends visible in the provincial elections have continued.

Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement only got 9% in the December, 2005 elections, but it has been reformulated away from being mainly Shiite secularists to being cross-sectarian, and presumably some of the 20% who said they would vote for it were Sunni Arabs. The INM was joined by Tariq al-Hashemi, a vice president and a Sunni Arab who formerly led the Iraqi Islamic Party, and by Salih Mutlak, the secular, Sunni Arab leader of the National Dialogue Front. Mutlak’s disqualification from running because of allegations of links to the banned Baath Party, and his recent call for his supporters to boycott the vote, could hurt Allawi’s poll numbers if the poll were taken now.

For this and other reasons, I doubt Allawi’s list will actually get 20% of seats in the new parliament. Iraqis have a discourse of national unity to which the list is appealing in its rhetoric. And Iraqis typically are embarrassed by sectarianism and deny its importance. But when they have gone to the polls in the past 5 years, they have almost always voted for ethnic or sectarian parties once in the privacy of the voting booth. There was also buzz for Allawi in fall of 2005 coming from polls done in the provinces by US AID and from the American Enterprise Institute (so I was told by journalists who interviewed us both), and it turned out not to amount to anything; Allawi’s contingent in parliament shrank from 14% to 9%.

The poll also gave some provincial estimates for voter support for al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition:

Baghdad: 32%
Basra: 41%
Babil: 49%
Dhi Qar: 42%
Karbala: 50%
Qadisiya: 56%
Muthanna: 44%

These numbers, if true, speak of a revolution in affairs since last year’s provincial election, since the State of Law only won 9% in Karbala then, and the most it got outside the two big Shiite cities was 23%. Because these results are so divergent from those of only a year ago, I have trouble accepting them as accurate. Services and security aren’t better, and unless al-Maliki is buying off constituents with patronage, it is hard for me to understand such a big swing in his favor.

There may also be a fear effect. Al-Maliki has been establishing tribal militias in the Shiite south loyal to him, and has moreover gotten control of a lot of the local police forces as well as the national army, so Iraqis may be reluctant to say to pollsters that they oppose him.

This poll suggests that al-Maliki’s party will pull in about 108 seats in the 325-seat parliament, and that Allawi’s list will get 72.

But the Shiite religious coalition, the National Iraqi Alliance, has done its own soundings, and thinks it will get 70-80 seats or as much as 25% of seats, not the 17% the National Media Center gives them. And the NIA thinks that 80 would make them the single largest party.

Although not all their leaders agree with such a strategy,it still seems most likely that al-Maliki’s State of Law and al-Hakim’s National Iraqi Alliance will make a post-election coalition, emerging as the largest bloc in parliament and forming the government again. Assuming al-Maliki’s party doesn’t actually get 30%, such a coalition might be the only way for him to remain prime minister, assuming he hasn’t burned too many bridges with the other Shiite religious parties to be viable.

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So you thought that Ahmed Chalabi and Ali al-Lami’s Accountability and Justice (De-Ba’athification) Committee had done all they could to wreck Iraq’s elections and advance their political agendas?  Not even.  Yesterday, in what al-Hayat calls a surprise move, Lami announced that the AJC had named 376 military, police and intelligence officers for de-Ba’athification. The list includes a number of important people in senior positions.

The political calculations here are transparent.  Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has the Constitutional right to except individuals from de-Ba’athification in the national interest, but presumably he won’t out of fear of being portrayed as "soft on the Ba’ath" in the last days of the election campaign.   Lami’s move will likely further inflame the situation, demonstrating the degradation and politicization of Iraqi state institutions and further antagonizing many Sunnis (Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi said today that the Iraqi government had "failed" at national reconciliation, though a return of civil war remains unlikely, while Ayad Allawi is on the defensive over his visit to Saudi Arabia to launch his election campaign).   That polarization will strengthen the electoral hand of the more sectarian parties, including of course the one for which Lami is personally a candidate. 

The impact of this new move hasn’t yet really begun to play out, but it will.   If you don’t know, now you know. 

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A string of bombings on Sunday targeted political offices of those parties willing to contest the March 7 parliamentary elections, including secular Sunnis. The violence comes as one more worry in the course of Iraq’s most controversial election.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that over a hundred (145) candidates for parliament were disqualified from running by the Appellate Board for their alleged ties to Baathism. Over 500 had initially been excluded, out of more than 6000. Of those, many did not appeal or their appeals were hastily put together and failed. There were about 75 reversals early on, and another 26 appeals were accepted this week.

But Salih Mutlak, Sunni, secular head of the National Dialogue Bloc, who had sat in parliament and led a contingent of 11 MPs, is among the more important of the 145 whose appeals were rejected. There are no obvious connections between him and ‘Baathism’ today, unless by that term is just meant anyone with a secular, Arab nationalist outlook.

Mutlak had joined the Iraqi Nationalist Movement Coalition led by former appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi. As a result, the court’s decision gave the appearance of slamming Allawi and his secular, cross-sectarian party list in particular. The so-called Justice and Accountability Committee, which initiated the disqualifications, is the remnant of the ‘debaathification committee’ set up by the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon and their ally Ahmad Chalabi to ensure that Sunni Arab nationalists with sympathies for the Palestinians and a tendency to ally with the greater Sunni Arab world were excluded from office in the new Iraq, in favor of Shiites and Kurds. Chalabi is still around and on the JAC. He has sometimes been accused of being a double agent for Iran and of helping sucker the US into overthrowing Saddam Hussein for Iran’s benefit. That the leadership of the committee that disqualified Mutlak is so obviously fundamentalist Shiites or Shiite politicians close to Iran infuriates Iraq’s Sunni Arabs.

Allawi announced that his Iraqi Nationalist Movement was suspending its campaign for parliament on Sunday, in protest against Mutlak’s exclusion. I suggested a couple of weeks ago that the whole point of the disqualifications may well have been to ensure that Allawi had no opportunity to form a government and return as prime minister (in the Iraqi constitution, the single largest party or coalition gets the first shot at forming a government,and with the Shiites splintered and running against one another in this election, such an opportunity could not be ruled out for Allawi had there been no disqualifications). But it should also be said that voting patterns in recent years did not favor a secular, cross-sectarian coalition, and my own guess is that it would not have done particularly well anyway. But Sunni Arabs, especially the majority who are secular-minded, will feel left out of national politics as a result of these decisions by the Shiite majority. Or perhaps the religious Sunnis will be incensed by this, too– VP Tariq al-Hashimi, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi version of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), is also a member of Allawi’s coalition. His fellow IIP party member, Dhafir al-Ani, was among those disqualified (how a Sunni revivalist is a Baathist is hard to fathom).

Allawi’s group is still appealing to the Federal Supreme Court or the Iraqi Parliament to intervene to stop the disqualifications.

The Iraqi Nationalist Movement also issued a press release to its followers in Salahuddin, Diyala and Nasiriya Provinces, saying that the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had launched a wave of arrests of political rivals, especially targeting members of the Iraqiya list, on a scale that threatens the integrity of the elections. They said al-Maliki wants to return Iraq to one-party rule (that of his Islamic Mission Party or the Da’wa).

Their plea that the arbitrary arrests cease and those incarcrated be released echoes the language of the political opposition in Iran (ironically, this borrowing of such language may be deliberate, since Iraqi Nationalist Movement supporters typically despise the theocratic Khamenei regime in Iran).

Sunni Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Iyad al-Samarra’i, admitted that those who had been disqualified had openly criticized paragraph 63 of the Iraqi constitution, which bans Baathists from any public role and makes the party illegal. But he said that members of parliament are granted by the same constitution the right to speak their minds on such issues, and should not be punished, though he disagrees with what they said (apparently, he had better).

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Salih Mutlak is now expressing skepticism that the March 7 parliamentary elections will be aboveboard. He said he is disturbed by the behavior of the parties closely linked to Iran, hinting that he was excluded from running at the behest of Tehran.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people demonstrated in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala against any return of the Baath Party, and protesting the willingness of authorities to entertain appeals from those disqualified. They said that they had had family members jailed as prisoners of conscience under the Baath Party. The disqualifications appear to have been enormously popular in the Shiite south.

Liz Sly reports that some Iraqi Shiites believe that al-Maliki and others are playing the Baath card cynically, as a way of scaring Shiites into continuing to vote for the religious parties that are most fiercely anti-Baathist.

The USG Open Source Center summarizes: “Al-Sabah carries on page 5 a 200-word report citing Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala’i, during the Friday Sermon in the Karbala Governorate, as warning against the phenomenon of buying votes of the citizens in the next legislative elections, and affirming that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has called on Muslims to abandon sectarianism.”

Many Iraqis fear that the Shiite National Iraqi Coalition will steal the election by buying votes,and a parliamentary leader of the coalition, Humam al-Hammudi, had to deny (al-Istiqamah, Feb. 11) rumors that party (which includes the pro-Iran Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) is already measuring curtains for the prime minister’s mansion.

Certainly, the chances for another big Shiite victory on March 7 have improved, as the Sunnis and secularists are talking about suspended campaigns and even boycotts.

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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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Al-Zaman reports in Arabic on Monday’s string of bombings in Baghdad, in which late reports say 37 persons were killed and more than 100 wounded. The bombings especially targeted the Jadiriya district, where many foreigners, diplomats, and Iraqi policiticians reside. Al-Zaman says that most leaders of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, including Ammar al-Hakim and parliamentarian Humam al-Hamudi, live there and there is a presence as guards of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of ISCI.

Two car bombs targeted the Palestine Meridien and the Babil hotels.

Other bombings sought to damage Al-Zuhur Hotel in a complex of hotel buildings that includes the al-Hamra’ and the Qurtaj.

Al-Hayat says that an Interior Ministry official alleged that all the bombings were suicide bombings. A Baghdad security official was quoted as saying that the suicide bomber who targeted the al-Hamra Hotel was accompanied by a band of armed men who shot it out with the hotel guards before the bomber ran his car into the building and detonated its payload.

Al=Zaman says that three katyusha rockets also targeted the US embassy in the green zone downtown. Parliament abruptly ended its session, with parliamentarians and their guards shouting that the katyushas falling on the green zone could target their session at any moment, and hurrying out of the hall.

In other violence on Monday, 7 were killed in political attacks in Mosul and two policemen were attacked in the northern contested city of Kirkuk.

AP has video:

The bombings are similar to those in August and December, so that it is probably not accurate to tie them to the upcoming parliamentary elections as some observers. including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are doing. They are not connected to specific events, but rather the manifestation of a still-powerful Sunni Arab guerrilla insurgency unreconciled to the emergence of a Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated Iraq, and which is determined to destabilize and overthrow this new ruling government.

Sawt al-Iraq transmits analysis from the Kuwaiti al-Qabas that points out that the attacks demonstrate the existence of a sophisticated intelligence and planning cell within the insurgency that is capable of gathering the detailed information necessary for such an attack and coordinating multiple field officers. The piece also laments that Iraqi government security forces seem still to be relatively incompetent at forestalling these periodic big assaults on Baghdad’s landmarks. Those security forces are at the moment a laughingstock because of their preference for phoney ‘bomb-detecting devices’ that are just a scam of some British company, which the UK government has now forbidden to export to Iraq.

Al-Qabas also argues that the attacks on fancy hotels were clearly aimed at hurting foreign investment in Iraq, at discouraging foreigners from visiting the country (and thus isolating it) and in hurting public confidence. The hotels also have the advantage of being relatively soft targets with regard to security, as compared to Iraqi military installations. Since so many journalists stay in those hotels, the attacks were sure to get a lot of publicity and to send the signal that the new Iraq is unstable and perhaps unsustainable.

But if the bombings are not necessarily motivated by upcoming elections, the article says, they are nevertheless likely to have an effect on them. They come after 500 mostly Sunni Arab candidates were disqualified from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, and at a time when rumors are rife that high-ranking Sunni Arabs will be purged from the military and security agencies.

These steps derive in part from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s preoccupation with the threat of a Baathist comeback, but the purges he backs risk further alienating ordinary Sunni Arabs who had joined the party for instrumental rather than ideological reasons. The party after all ruled for 35 years, and few Iraqis had nothing at all to do with it.

And the attacks came on the day that the Iraqi government executed Ali Hasan al-Majid al-Tikriti, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, who used poison gas to repress the Kurds in 1988 (killing 5000 at Halabja), and who brutally put down a Shiite rebellion in spring, 1991, after the Gulf War. Aljazeera English has his obituary:

Iraqi Kurdistan erupted with joy at the news of the execution, though some Kurds expressed disappointment that it was not televised. The Iraqi government took pride in the execution having not been marred by the taunting and use of cell phones to record it that marred the execution of Saddam Hussein, and Kurdistan officials concurred. One regret many Kurds had was that the judgment against “Chemical Ali” had condemned him for “crimes against humanity” rather than, as they had wanted, for “genocide.”

The president of the Kurdistan super-province of Iraq, Massoud Barzani, is in Washington for consultations with President Barack Obama, another point of pride for Iraqi Kurds.

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Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad on Friday in a bid to settle conflicts over the March 7 parliamentary elections.

The exclusion of hundreds of candidates from the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections by the Accountability and Justice Committee, and signed off on by the High Electoral Commission, continues to generate lively controversy in Iraq. On Friday, the HEC head, Faraj al-Haidari, told AP that he expected yet more candidates to be excluded. Most of the ex-Baathists being forbidden from running are Sunni Arabs, many running on secular parties, so that the move benefits the Shiite religious parties. Some suspect that the latter are being pressured by Iran or are trying to please it by excluding Arab nationalists (many of whom supported Iraq’s invasion of Iran in the 1980s). Reidar Vissar breaks down the some 500 candidates excluded by party and finds that the list targets the secular parties.

For the Obama administration, the stakes are high. If current Sunni-Shiite tensions over the elections boil over, the ensuing instability could endanger the withdrawal timetable to which Obama is committed. The 110,000 US troops now in Iraq will help lock the country down for the March 7 elections, and after that more than half will be withdrawn through the spring and summer.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Biden met with the presidential council (President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi (a Sunni Arab); and Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi (a Shiite). Abdul Mahdi is recently returned from Iran, and is said to have briefed Biden on Tehran’s view of the Iraq crisis. Biden then met separately with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Zaman says that Biden agrees with Talabani that the Accountability and Justice Committee has no legal standing, and urged Iraqi leaders nt to allow it to damage the credibility of the March parliamentary elections.

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic points out that there is a conflict between President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over the issue. Talabani questioned the legitimacy of the Accountability and Justice Committee, saying no such body had been authorized by the parliament. He also said that while those who followed or were close to Saddam Hussein could be legitimately excluded from politics, mere former members of the Baath Party should not (the party ruled Iraq for 35 years and lots of people felt they had to join for various reasons, even just to get a passport.) Al-Maliki has supported the exclusions, though he went further in a speech on Friday and said that the electoral commission alone could not hope to wipe out the Baath legacy, but rather it was the task of the Iraqi electorate.

Biden’s mission was rejected as outside interference by several Iraqi politicians, including Abdul Karim Anazi, a leader of the (Shiite fundamentalist) Islamic Dawa- Internal Organization, and al-Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh.

One possible solution suggested by some is to have Salih Mutlak, the most prominent of the politicians excluded from runnin in March, sign a formal disavowel of the Baath Party. Mutlak’s National Dialogue Bloc has 11 seats in the current parliament and is part of the joint Sunni-Shiite, secular-leaning National Coalition. On Friday, Mutlak said he would sign no disavowal, since it was effectively a ‘test of honorability’ to which he could not subject himself. He has appealed the ruling of the High Electoral Commission to the courts, and says he expects to be reinstated as a candidate.

Aljazeera English reports on the electoral controversy in Iraq over the exclusion of ‘Baathist’ candidates and parties.

The Baath or ‘resurrection’ party was formed in the 1940s and combined pan-Arab nationalism with socialist economic principles. After a short-lived coup in 1963, it came to power in Iraq in 1968 and ruled until overthrown by George W. Bush in 2003. A one-party state, it created a large public sector and repressed dissent. In the period 1988-1992 it committed massacres of Kurds and Shiites over their perceived inclination toward Iran, with which Iraq fought a vicious war 1980-1988. From 1979, the head of the party was Saddam Hussein, a particularly brutal dictator who promoted a disproportionate number of Sunni Arabs into leadership roles.

The Baath era still haunts Iraqi politics. On Friday, Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr denounced his Shiite rival, cleric Ammar al-Hakim, for cooperating with the American occupation and being soft on the Baathists. Al-Hakim leads the Shiite fundamentalist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has indeed cooperated with the US. But ISCI is as anti-Baath as the other Shiite religious parties. Sadr is likely trying to hurt ISCI’s electoral chances.

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As the disqualification of some 500 leading Iraqi politicians on the grounds of alleged ties to the Baath Party is continuing to roil Iraqi politics, Arab papers today report that both U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Vice President Joseph Biden have been intervening with Iraqi officials in an attempt to find a way to walk back the disastrous decision — perhaps by postponing the implementation of the committee’s decisions until after the election.  The commission in turn is complaining about foreign interference, while Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki broke his silence by calling to "not politicize" the process (a bit late for that, no?) and some Iraqi outlets are screaming about alleged American threats.  There is still a chance that the appeals process could provide an exit strategy, but this doesn’t seem hugely likely at this point; the final list of those disqualified is set to be released tomorrow.  

Iraqi politicians, especially those associated with Mutlak’s bloc such
as Ayad Allawi and Tareq al-Hashemi, have been loudly complaining about alleged conflict of interest and abuse of power behind the moves.  The indefatigable Norwegian researcher Reider Visser deserves credit for unearthing that Ali Faysal al-Lami, who spent about a year in a U.S.-run prison on charges of complicity with attacks by Shia militias and runs the Parliamentary committee responsible for the disqualifications, is actually standing for election on Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress list.    Visser, like a number of Iraqi analysts, argue that they are using their official positions to stack the deck in their own favor:  "It is they who effectively control the vetting process for the entire elections process. They enjoy full support in this from Iran; meanwhile  their leaders are being feted in Washington, where Adil Abd al-Mahdi has just been visiting."   The committee’s defenders claim that it is simply enforcing the law.   Finally, the editor of the Saudi al-Sharq al-Awsat complains that Iran’s allies in Iraq are using their control of the mechanisms of Iraqi democracy to seize power for themselves on behalf of Iran — and the similarity between the DeBaath "vetting" of candidates and Iran’s Guardians Council’s vettting of candidates has been noted. 

This is a potential fiasco in the  making, but shouldn’t come as such a great shock even if it is unusually brazen. There’s nothing new about the unresolved sectarian conflicts in Iraq, the ongoing failure to institutionalize Sunni integration into the Shia-dominated  political system, the failure to implement political accommodation agreements, or the ways the institutional levers of the state were being used by "the powers that be" to maintain their dominance.  The combination of improved security, the self-interest of a wide range of Iraqi groups and politicians, and the clear U.S. commitment to drawing down its military forces have generated some real positive progress but the unresolved institutional and political conflicts remain clearly evident.   This current tempest increases the prospects that the March elections will not deliver the legitimacy or the resolution of deep underlying conflicts which so many people have counted upon — which was the reason for my skepticism about pegging the U.S. drawdown to the elections in the first place.  

It would be far better if Iraqis could reach agreement on issues like the election law and this current frenzy without intense American involvement.  But since the U.S. did decide to peg its military drawdown to the
election there’s little choice now but for Biden and Hill and others to get as involved as they have been over the last few days to try to find
a solution.  But under no circumstances should this become an excuse to delay the military drawdown, which would simply remove the only incentive Iraqi politicians have to make political accommodations, infuriate Iraqi public opinion, and trap the U.S. there indefinitely.   There’s no contradiction between insisting on maintaining a clear and firm commitment to military drawdown and calling for close attention to Iraqi politics.   Indeed, more attention to politics and less focus on the military dimension is exactly what has been called for all along — and hopefully this crisis will be worked out and the right lessons learned on all sides.

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