Arab News Blog

Lang at SST/ here

“…. the increase in American troops on the ground was very useful in many ways, but I continue to think that the essential development that “turned the tide” for a while was the serendipitous realization on the part of Iraqi Sunni Arabs and an emerging number of US military that the insurgents had little in common with AQI and that cooperation was possible. From that, all else flowed even unto the death of these two fanatics. Will that last? Look to the outcome of the recount in Baghdad for an answer. Is there an esoteric meaning to this talking “bidness” of the “Surge?” I do not know, but if the COIN campaign in south Afghanistan does not go well, will there be an appeal in the media and the WH (in that order) for more troops? Will Obama accept that apparent defiance of his orders?

And then there is the leading editorial in the Washington Post in which Hiatt says that “they” are not advocating military action against Iran. IM experience, when someone tells you that they are not doing or advocating something, then you should know that they are doing or advocating that. The WP editorial is part of the ongoing “full court press” by Israeli/AIPAC information ops designed to move American public opinion to acceptance of an AMERICAN air war against Iran. The Israelis know that they themselves lack the ability to punch this much above their weight. All that nonsense about Osirak and Syria is just that. Mowing your lawn and mowing the grass at Arlington National Cemetery are both grass cutting. but…

And then, today, there was Bruce Riedel (Reidel?) a once upon a time colleague. He was on the tube today to “answer for” Gates’ leaked memo about Iran strategy. I wonder who leaked that? (irony) Riedel insisted that Iran will inevitably attain some kind of nuclear weapon capability and that what Gates (and he) believe is that the US must begin to plan for the long term methods to be employed in managing that phenomenon. The well programmed and probably fearful anchors (Todd and Guthrie) produced all the usual objections; Israeli unilateral attacks, “don’t give up the ship,” etc. In spite of this, Bruce, in his usual humorless, stolid way, persisted in defending the truth of American interest and Israel’s limited capability. God bless, Bruce. pl

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Sunday’s vote for a new parliament in Iraq on Sunday could result in two possible geopolitical futures for that country.

If the Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi did well enough to come to power, that would reorient Iraq radically, taking it back in some ways to 2002. Allawi’s coalition is largely made up of Arab nationalists who would see Iran as a threat and would ally with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Baghdad would go back to helping contain Iran. Sunni Arab radicalism would likely be tamped down. For Washington, it would be the best of all possible worlds– a pro-American Iraqi government headed by a former CIA asset that is willing to help pressure Iran for the West. Internally, an Allawi government that depends heavily on Sunni Arab constituencies would find it difficult to compromise with the Kurds on the disputed province of Kirkuk or on Kurdistan’s interests in Ninevah and Diyala, setting the stage for a potential civil war.

If, on the other hand, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki manages to hold on to power, Iraq will remain firmly in Shiite hands, and will likely have warm relations with Tehran. Certainly, Baghdad would have no interest in helping contain Iran. Relations with Saudi Arabia will continue to be bad. As the US withdraws, Iranian influence could ramp up and fill the vacuum. Al-Maliki also has his tensions with the Kurds, but his relatively bad relations with the Sunni Arabs of Mosul mean that he could deal with the Kurds without incurring much more enmity from the Sunni Arabs than he already does.

So those are the two possibilities facing Iraq– roughly, reintegration into the Sunni-dominated Arab League, or an Iran alliance. In a way, the choices replicate those of the 1930s, Iraq’s first decade of independence from Britain. The government of PM Hikmat Sulaiman in 1936-1937 rejected Arab nationalism and developed good relations with Iran. Sulaiman was a Turkmen and he served under the military dictatorship of Bakr al-Sidqi, a Kurd. There is a sense in which the al-Maliki-Talibani condominium of the past 4 years revives many geopolitical themes of the Sulaiman-Sidqi period. Their dire enemies were the Arab nationalist officers, who were focused on Palestine and felt more kinship with Egypt than with Iran. Allawi is more in that Arab nationalist tradition, though he is by heritage a Shiite.

Here is why I think the return of Allawi as prime minister is unlikely despite an apparently strong showing for his party in the elections.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab London daily “The Middle East” [al-Sharq al-Awsat] is reporting that its correspondents are conveying an (unscientific) impression from exit polling that the Iraqi National List of Allawi is doing extremely well in the Sunni Arab provinces, and is running a strong second in the Shiite south (Kurds in the north typically vote only for Kurdish parties.) The report is rather breathless and I think the numbers are almost certainly exaggerated. It also alleges that current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition is getting 40% of votes in the Shiite south, which may be true for Baghdad and Basra (it did nearly that well in the provincial elections last year), but it would represent a major change in voting patterns in rural Shiite provinces such as Maysan and Dhi Qar.

Even so, without an unexpected landslide in the south, Allawi is unlikely to become prime minister. He will need 163 seats out of 325 to govern, and there is probably no way for his coalition to deliver them. Even leading lists will likely get less that 100 seats, and so will need post-election coalition partners. That small parties willing to ally with Allawi would have as many as 75 seats to deliver to him seems unlikely. So he’d have to deal with the big three–the State of Law, the National Iraqi Alliance, and the Kurdistan Alliance (or the Kurdistan parties generally). But they might well decline to deal with him, and could seek to exclude him instead.

Al-Maliki’s State of Law list campaigned hard against the resurgence of Baathism, and Allawi and many on his list are ex-Baathists, so al-Maliki would have to eat a lot of crow to accept a junior position in an Allawi government. It seems unlikely, even if politics makes for strange bedfellows.

The Shiite religious parties grouped in the National Iraqi Alliance are said by the exit polls (for the little they are worth) to be coming in third. They are also highly unlikely to ally with Allawi, since he is an old-time CIA asset and ex-Baathist whose interim government was hostile to the Shiite religious authorities and to Iran.

Allawi appears to be attracting strong support in Ninevah Province in the north, which returned an Arab nationalist party in the provincial elections of 2009. Ninevah has a Sunni Arab majority and a Kurdish minority, but the Kurds had been dominant in provincial government and the security forces because the Sunnis had sat out the provincial elections of January 2005. There is very bad blood between the Arabs and Kurds in Ninevah.

So Allawi will find it difficult to ally with the Kurds while keeping his Sunni Arab nationalist base. But not only would he need the Kurds to get a simple majority if the other two big coalitions spurned him, but it will take a multi-party coaltion of 215 or so members of parliament to elect a president.

Whereas the numbers don’t easily add up for Allawi, it seems likely that the State of Law, the Shiite fundamentalist parties of the NIA, and some smaller parties willing to join the two of them, could easily get to over 163, and they have a proven ability to work with the Kurds and independents to get to 215. In order to block this scenario, Allawi’s list would have to get well over 100 seats and be united and disciplined.

As I suggested Sunday, one price al-Maliki might have to pay to gain the National Iraqi alliance as a partner is to agree to accelerate the US troop withdrawal (a key demand of the Sadr faction in the NIA).

Whatever the outcome of the voting (and a projected result based on one-third of the votes is scheduled to be announced on Wednesday), it may not be easily accepted by the losers. There is tremendous anxiety in Iraq about the possibility of ballot fraud in the wake of Sunday’s parliamentary elections. The Iranian Arabic-language satellite station al-Alam reported on Sunday that the Shiite fundamentalist Sadr movement was alarmed to hear that ballot boxes were being transported from the provinces to Baghdad by US troops, and insisted that the US be kept away from those boxes. (They must have heard about Florida in 2000). Allawi is on Aljazeera complaining about irregularities. He didn’t say this, but campaigning continued through Sunday althought it was supposed to be forbidden after Friday late afternoon. In Basra, al-Hayat reports that anti-Allawi pamphlets were dropped by helicopter on Saturday and Snday.

Bottom line, another Allawi prime ministership is unlikely even if his list turns in strong performance.

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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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Manama (Bahrain), Oct 30 (DPA) Thousands of demonstrators in Bahrain Friday demanded an end to the alleged politically-motivated naturalisation of Sunni Arabs and Asians on the island.
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I have some basic questions about the “take, clear and hold” strategy that seems to be recommended in Afghanistan by Gen. Stan McChrystal, and which is modeled on the alleged lessons of Iraq.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who produced most of the insurgency against the US presence and the rise of a new Shiite government, amount to less than 20 percent of Iraq’s population of 27 million. In other words, they are about 5 million strong. The compact Sunni areas such as al-Anbar Province have been special challenges.

The Pashtuns of Afghanistan, in contrast, are probably 44% of the population of 34 million, or a little over 14 million.

In other words, pacifying the Pashtuns from whom the Taliban emerge is three times more difficult than monitoring and pacifying Iraq.

Moreover, the Sunni Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Baghdad by Shiite militias, making them more willing to listen to the US and to form Awakening Councils. The Pashtuns have not been defeated by anyone.

I doubt the US & NATO have the sheer resources to put down the guerrillas in Afghanistan.

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From the ‘never-failing-to-be-idiotic’ Michael Totten in Commentary, here

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