Arab News Blog

In an apparent bid to divide Shiites and Sunnis on the eve of Sunday’s parliamentary election, guerrillas on Saturday morning set off a bomb only 900 feet from the shrine of Imam Ali (which has the sort of place in the hearts of Shiite Muslims that the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome has for Catholics).

Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadr Movement within the National Iraqi Alliance, issued a fatwa or religious legal ruling on Friday insisting that believers must vote in Sunday’s election and terming going to vote “political resistance,” which produces success when a group is united, and ordering his adherents to unite. The WSJ says that the Sadrists are using very canny electoral techniques in a quest to ensure they win as many seats as possible in Sunday’s election.

If the Sadrists succeed in rallying the Shiite masses to vote as an act of defiance toward the US military presence and the complaisance of the al-Maliki government, it could change the political landcape.

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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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AP – The leader of Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah recently delivered an odd but deeply important political message to his followers: Heed traffic signs and pay your electric bills.

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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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I am going to speculate a little today, but I am hoping it is informed speculation. I think an end-game drama is playing out in Iraq between the United States and Iran, and possibly among factions of Americans in Iraq, over the likely leader of the next Iraqi government. I am going to argue that the disqualification of 500 candidates, some of them prominent Sunni Arabs, was not a sectarian measure, but a strategic strike at a single candidate. Update: The ban on the 500 candidates has just been lifted.

Iraqi Vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab and member of the three-man presidential council, visited Washington for consultations with President Barack Obama on Tuesday. In an interview with political scientist Marc Lynch, al-Hashimi was clearly upset about the decision of the High Electoral Commission to exclude over 500 candidates, many of them Sunni Arabs, from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections because of their alleged connections to the banned Baath Party (the secular Arab nationalist party that had been taken over by Saddam Hussein in 1979). But he was apparently not sure how much US intervention he wanted in the crisis. The visit appears to have been extremely successful, insofar as back in Baghdad the ban was lifted on Wednesday.

I think the visit was to strategize with the US over how to counter the Shiite chess move, which was probably carried out in consultation with Iran, aimed at checkmating candidate for prime minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is one of five or six plausible successors to current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, assuming al-Maliki cannot muster the seats to allow him a second term. They also include Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who broke off from the Da’wa Party, perpetual gadfly and Neoconservative favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, and a couple of others. Of them all, only Allawi is anti-Iran. Of them all, only Chalabi might try to recognize Israel, though many suspect him of being a double agent for Iran.

Al-Maliki, head of the Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa), is running in the State of Laws coalition. But that coalition is mainly made up of the Islamic Mission Party, which just has not been a dominating party in the elections held so far. Unlike in the past two parliamentary elections, al-Maliki declined to join the big coalition of Shiite religious parties, now called the Iraqi National Alliance, which includes the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadr Movement. The Shiite vote could therefore end up being split.

Since the Iraqi constitution specifies that the single party or party-coalition that has the largest number of seats will be given the first shot at forming a government, al-Maliki could only get a second term if Da’wa does unprecedentedly well and outpolls almost all the other Shiite parties together. Worse for Shiite interests, you could imagine a situation where Da’wa gets 65 seats and the Iraqi National Alliance gets 70, but where some other coalition gets 73. It could be the Kurdistan Alliance, or the new cross-sectarian secular coalition of Ayad Allawi, to which Hashimi belongs. If Allawi’s list got the 73 seats in this scenario, he would have the chance to try to form a government.

Allawi, an ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction, was a CIA asset in the 1990s in London, in charge of running the officers in the Iraqi military who defected from the Saddam Hussein regime, and of coordinating terrorist attacks in Baghdad and attempts to assassinate or overthrow Saddam Hussein. Allawi appears to be too much of an Arab nationalist to look with favor on reconciliation with Israel, and so he was disliked by the Neoconservatives in the US. But he was favored behind the scenes by the CIA, which managed to convince George W. Bush to appoint him interim prime minister in June, 2004, a post he held until he was defeated by the religious Shiite parties early the following year. While Allawi was in power, he appointed hard line Sunni Arab nationalists to key positions, including Defence and Interior, who constantly attacked Iran and called it Iraq’s number one enemy. Iran was very upset about this emergence of a Washington-backed ‘Baath lite’ in Baghdad, and may have responded by helping fund the political campaigns of the Shiite religious parties in fall of 2004. The United Iraqi Alliance, Shiite religious parties who made a coalition with each other, unseated Allawi in the January 2005 parliamentary elections, and trounced him again in December 2005.

Allawi leads a small coalition that has 25 members in parliament. He has occasionally attempted to put together a coalition of parties in hopes of unseating al-Maliki, who is too pro-Iran and pro-Shiite religious groups for his taste. But Allawi’s efforts in that direction never bore fruit and he appears not to have gotten the green light from Washington to make a serious push.

But Allawi suddenly became a plausible candidate for prime minister in January for four reasons.

First, the Shiite religious parties are not running unitedly, and so the Shiite vote could well be split.

Second, he did manage to put together Iraqi National Movement that groups both Sunnis and Shiites, most of them secular but including also some religiously-oriented figures.. It includes VP Tariq al-Hashimi as well as Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, the Shiite ‘Prince of the Marshes’ and Marsh Arab leader who led a group called Hizbullah in insurgency against the Saddam Hussein regime and is now a notable and leader in Amara. It also included the National Dialogue Bloc of Salih Mutlak, which has 11 seats in parliament, and is made up of Sunni Arab nationalists.

Third, secular parties did relatively well in the January 2009 provincial elections. A Sunni Arab nationalist party, al-Hadba’, took over the northern province of Ninevah. Secular or tribal Sunni Arab groupings did well in al-Anbar and Diyala provinces. And while Da’wa or the Islamic Mission Party is a Shiite fundamentalist grouping, it avoided religious rhetoric in the campaign and did well, especially in Baghdad and Basra.

Fourth, in mid-December Iranian forces took over the Fakka oil field, claimed by Iraq, and raised an Iranian flag over it. This move put the Iraqi Shiite parties, which are close to Iran and probably receive emoluments from Tehran, in a very difficult position. The Iraqi public wanted thunderous denunciations of Iran. None were forthcoming from al-Maliki or other Shiite leaders, though they successfully worked behind the scenes for an Iranian withdrawal. Allawi’s coalition partner, Salih Mutlak, complained bitterly not only about the Iranian incursion but also about al-Maliki’s silence. The Iraqi Shiite press in turn complained about the attempts to promote Irano-phobia in certain quarters. Iraqis are nationalistic, and an anti-Iran backlash could have awarded Allawi’s coalition enough seats to let him form the government.

An Allawi victory would be music to Washington’s ears, because the Obama administration and the US military could withdraw from an Iraq ruled by a secular Arab nationalist government profoundly suspicious of Iran.

The banning of the candidates, with Mutlak at their head, had been initiated by the Accountability and Justice Committee, headed by Ali al-Lami, a militant Shiite. He was arrested in summer of 2008 by the US military on returning from a trip to Beirut, on suspicion that he was a covert leader of the rogue cells called “Special Groups,” within the Mahdi Army. These Special Groups were suspected of being run by the Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade or special forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He has also been linked to the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, a splinter of the Sadrist Movement involved in the kidnapping of Britishers. Al-Maliki recently released a leader of this radical group, Qais al-Khazali, who will likely campaign for al-Maliki.

Lami is himself running for parliament as part of the Shiite religious parties coalition. He is said to be close to Chalabi, who supported the attempted exclusions.

So it looks to me as though Lami’s move may have been intended to make sure that Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement could not emerge as the largest single bloc in parliament on March 7. The constitution, mind you, doesn’t specify that the party or coalition that forms the government be a plurality or majority. It just has to be the single largest group. By excluding Mutlaq, Lami would have blunted al-Maliki’s momentum significantly, and might even have provoked some Sunnis to boycott the elections, which would have weakened Allawi’s bloc further. Unsurprisingly, al-Maliki was enthusiastic about the exclusions.

I surmise that Iran, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps that used to run Lami and Khazali, and some Iraqi Shiite religious parties are conspiring to ensure that whether al-Maliki survives or not (and he is perfectly acceptable to them), the next prime minister of Iraq comes from one of the Shiite religious parties and so remains aligned with Tehran. A possible but unlikely scenario is that fierce Da’wa/ ISCI rivalry allows Chalabi to emerge as a compromise candidate.

The March 7 elections will therefore help to determine whether the US withdrawal from Iraq leaves behind a strong ally of Iran or a government with lukewarm or bad relations with Tehran.

Personally, I don’t find it plausible that even without the disqualifications of Mutlak and some others, now lifted, Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement can emerge as the biggest in parliament or that he can become prime minister. He has too much baggage. But he now has a fighting chance.

It is said that al-Maliki’s own polling points to a Da’wa win. But that development would also surprise me. I think he could get a second term, but it would be by entering a post-election coalition with the Iraqi National Alliance (the Shiite religious parties). It is also possible that the INA will have the most seats, and that Adil Abdul Mahdi of ISCI could emerge as the strongest candidate.

Since al-Maliki is the first fairly strong leader in post-Baath Iraq, and since he seems genuinely to have gotten control of the Iraqi armed forces, any change in prime minister does raise the specter that his successor will not be as good at the game of military influence, leading to more instability.

Long story short, the March 7 elections and the politics around them are only in part sectarian. They are also about the relative position of Washington and Tehran in Baghdad as US troops rapidly withdraw.

It remains to be seen I Washington’s surprise win over Iran Wednesday is a prelude to a major geopolitical shift in Baghdad on the eve of the US withdrawal.

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I am going to speculate a little today, but I am hoping it is informed speculation. I think an end-game drama is playing out in Iraq between the United States and Iran, and possibly among factions of Americans in Iraq, over the likely leader of the next Iraqi government. I am going to argue that the disqualification of 500 candidates, some of them prominent Sunni Arabs, is not a sectarian measure, but a strategic strike at a single candidate.

Iraqi Vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab and member of the three-man presidential council, visited Washington for consultations with President Barack Obama on Tuesday. In an interview with political scientist Marc Lynch, al-Hashimi was clearly upset about the decision of the High Electoral Commission to exclude over 500 candidates, many of them Sunni Arabs, from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections because of their alleged connections to the banned Baath Party (the secular Arab nationalist party that had been taken over by Saddam Hussein in 1979). But he was apparently not sure how much US intervention he wanted in the crisis.

I think the visit was to strategize with the US over how to counter the Shiite chess move, which was probably carried out in consultation with Iran, aimed at checkmating candidate for prime minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is one of five or six plausible successors to current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, assuming al-Maliki cannot muster the seats to allow him a second term. They also include Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who broke off from the Da’wa Party, perpetual gadfly and Neoconservative favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, and a couple of others. Of them all, only Allawi is anti-Iran. Of them all, only Chalabi might try to recognize Israel, though many suspect him of being a double agent for Iran.

Al-Maliki, head of the Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa), is running in the State of Laws coalition. But that coalition is mainly made up of the Islamic Mission Party, which just has not been a dominating party in the elections held so far. Unlike in the past two parliamentary elections, al-Maliki declined to join the big coalition of Shiite religious parties, now called the Iraqi National Alliance, which includes the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadr Movement. The Shiite vote could therefore end up being split.

Since the Iraqi constitution specifies that the single party or party-coalition that has the largest number of seats will be given the first shot at forming a government, al-Maliki could only get a second term if Da’wa does unprecedentedly well and outpolls almost all the other Shiite parties together. Worse for Shiite interests, you could imagine a situation where Da’wa gets 65 seats and the Iraqi National Alliance gets 70, but where some other coalition gets 73. It could be the Kurdistan Alliance, or the new cross-sectarian secular coalition of Ayad Allawi, to which Hashimi belongs. If Allawi’s list got the 73 seats in this scenario, he would have the chance to try to form a government.

Allawi, an ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction, was a CIA asset in the 1990s in London, in charge of running the officers in the Iraqi military who defected from the Saddam Hussein regime, and of coordinating terrorist attacks in Baghdad and attempts to assassinate or overthrow Saddam Hussein. Allawi appears to be too much of an Arab nationalist to look with favor on reconciliation with Israel, and so he was disliked by the Neoconservatives in the US. But he was favored behind the scenes by the CIA, which managed to convince George W. Bush to appoint him interim prime minister in June, 2004, a post he held until he was defeated by the religious Shiite parties early the following year. While Allawi was in power, he appointed hard line Sunni Arab nationalists to key positions, including Defence and Interior, who constantly attacked Iran and called it Iraq’s number one enemy. Iran was very upset about this emergence of a Washington-backed ‘Baath lite’ in Baghdad, and may have responded by helping fund the political campaigns of the Shiite religious parties in fall of 2004. The United Iraqi Alliance, Shiite religious parties who made a coalition with each other, unseated Allawi in the January 2005 parliamentary elections, and trounced him again in December 2005.

Allawi leads a small coalition that has 25 members in parliament. He has occasionally attempted to put together a coalition of parties in hopes of unseating al-Maliki, who is to pro-Iran and pro-Shiite religious groups for his taste. But Allawi’s efforts in that direction never bore fruit and he appears not to have gotten the green light from Washington to make a serious push.

But Allawi suddenly became a plausible candidate for prime minister in January for four reasons.

First, the Shiite religious parties are not running unitedly, and so the Shiite vote could well be split.

Second, he did manage to put together Iraqi National Movement that groups both Sunnis and Shiites, most of them secular but including also some religiously-oriented figures.. It includes VP Tariq al-Hashimi as well as Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, the Shiite ‘Prince of the Marshes’ and Marsh Arab leader who led a group called Hizbullah in insurgency against the Saddam Hussein regime and is now a notable and leader in Amara. It also included the National Dialogue Bloc of Salih Mutlak, which has 11 seats in parliament, and is made up of Sunni Arab nationalists.

Third, secular parties did relatively well in the January 2009 provincial elections. A Sunni Arab nationalist party, al-Hadba’, took over the northern province of Ninevah. Secular or tribal Sunni Arab groupings did well in al-Anbar and Diyala provinces. And while Da’wa or the Islamic Mission Party is a Shiite fundamentalist grouping, it avoided religious rhetoric in the campaign and did well, especially in Baghdad and Basra.

Fourth, in mid-December Iranian forces took over the Fakka oil field, claimed by Iraq, and raised an Iranian flag over it. This move put the Iraqi Shiite parties, which are close to Iran and probably receive emoluments from Tehran, in a very difficult position. The Iraqi public wanted thunderous denunciations of Iran. None were forthcoming from al-Maliki or other Shiite leaders, though they successfully worked behind the scenes for an Iranian withdrawal. Allawi’s coalition partner, Salih Mutlak, complained bitterly not only about the Iranian incursion but also about al-Maliki’s silence. The Iraqi Shiite press in turn complained about the attempts to promote Irano-phobia in certain quarters. Iraqis are nationalistic, and an anti-Iran backlash could have awarded Allawi’s coalition enough seats to let him form the government.

An Allawi victory would have been music to Washington’s ears, because the Obama administration and the US military could withdraw from an Iraq ruled by a secular Arab nationalist government profoundly suspicious of Iran.

The banning of the candidates, with Mutlak at their head, was initiated by the Accountability and Justice Committee, headed by Ali al-Lami, a militant Shiite. He was arrested in summer of 2008 by the US military on returning from a trip to Beirut, on suspicion that he was a covert leader of the rogue cells called “Special Groups,” within the Mahdi Army. These Special Groups were suspected of being run by the Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade or special forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He has also been linked to the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, a splinter of the Sadrist Movement involved in the kidnapping of Britishers. Al-Maliki recently released a leader of this radical group, Qais al-Khazali, who will likely campaign for al-Maliki.

Lami is himself running for parliament as part of the Shiite religious parties coalition. He is said to be close to Chalabi, who supports the exclusions.

So it looks to me as though Lami’s move may have been intended to make sure that Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement could not emerge as the largest single bloc in parliament on March 7. The constitution, mind you, doesn’t specify that the party or coalition that forms the government be a plurality or majority. It just has to be the single largest group. By excluding Mutlaq, Lami blunted al-Maliki’s momentum significantly, and may even have provoked some Sunnis to boycott the elections, which would weaken Allawi’s bloc further. Unsurprisingly, al-Maliki was enthusiastic about the exclusions.

I surmise that Iran, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps that used to run Lami and Khazali, and some Iraqi Shiite religious parties are conspiring to ensure that whether al-Maliki survives or not (and he is perfectly acceptable to them), the next prime minister of Iraq comes from one of the Shiite religious parties and so remains aligned with Tehran. A possible but unlikely scenario is that fierce Da’wa/ ISCI rivalry allows Chalabi to emerge as a compromise candidate.

The March 7 elections will therefore help to determine whether the US withdrawal from Iraq leaves behind a strong ally of Iran or a government with lukewarm or bad relations with Tehran.

Personally, I don’t find it plausible that even without the disqualifications of Mutlak and some others, Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement would have been the biggest in parliament or that he could become prime minister. He has too much baggage.

It is said that al-Maliki’s own polling points to a Da’wa win. But that development would also surprise me. I think he could get a second term, but it would be by entering a post-election coalition with the Iraqi National Alliance (the Shiite religious parties). It is also possible that the INA will have the most seats, and that Adil Abdul Mahdi of ISCI could emerge as the strongest candidate.

Since al-Maliki is the first fairly strong leader in post-Baath Iraq, and since he seems genuinely to have gotten control of the Iraqi armed forces, any change in prime minister does raise the specter that his successor will not be as good at the game of military influence, leading to more instability.

Long story short, the March 7 elections and the politics around them are only in part sectarian. They are also about the relative position of Washington and Tehran in Baghdad as US troops rapidly withdraw.

End/ (Not Continued)

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In the National, here

“… “The war was terrible for Lebanon but I made $10,000 profit in just a few weeks,” Mr Mahdi admits. “But prices just kept rising.”

He says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.

“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”

This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.

“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”

“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”

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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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AFP – Israel is heading toward a new war with Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah, a cabinet minister warned Saturday in remarks carried by military radio and the popular Ynet news website.

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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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