AND THE WINNER IN IRAQ WILL BE….TENSION. CONFLICT AND SHARIA
SPIEGEL ONLINE
Stability at Stake
Sectarian Tensions Overshadow Iraq Election
By Bernhard Zand
Iraqis go to the polls Sunday for the country’s second parliamentary election since the fall of Saddam Hussein. But the decision to bar over 170 candidates threatens the vote’s credibility, and Iran and Saudia Arabia are jockeying for influence behind the scenes.
Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, 65, lives in the former Brazilian embassy, one of Baghdad’s most beautiful and hospitable houses, filled with historic portraits, exquisite Persian rugs and brilliant conversation. Western diplomats rave about the dinners Chalabi gives.
Dr. Ayad Allawi, 64, has set up the headquarters of his campaign list in a functional building where a local group of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party used to meet. It is a drab, bunker-like place with soiled wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning that rattles in the summer and heating that doesn’t work in the winter. But none of this matters, because the candidate, a former prime minister, is mostly traveling abroad and doesn’t spend much time in Iraq.
Both men are Shiites and in their sixties, and they have known each since they were fellow students at a Jesuit school in Baghdad. And both are waiting for this Sunday, when the Iraqis elect a regular parliament, for the second time since the overthrow of the dictator. With almost 19 million voters, 5,500 candidates and 50,000 polling places, the election promises to be a celebration of democracy. In fact, it is so important to the government that it has declared a five-day national holiday, has barred Iraqis from carrying weapons for two days and has even banned vehicles from the roads on the day of the election, to reduce the risk of attacks.
Both Chalabi and Allawi hope that the Sunday of the election will signal a move for one of them, to the place where a third man currently presides in the office of prime minister: Nouri al-Maliki, 59. He lives and works in the heavily secured Green Zone, in a villa on the banks of the Tigris River, a place filled with makeshift solutions, where foreign dignitaries are often forced to spend hours waiting — in a garage that has been repurposed into a reception room, complete with damask curtains and heavy armchairs — to meet with the prime minister.
Holding on to Power
A year ago, it seemed clear that the incumbent would win the election. Al-Maliki, who up until then had been an unknown politician, came into office more than four years ago as the divided Shiite camp’s compromise candidate. He has held onto power despite the many catastrophes of postwar Iraq, proving to be a tough negotiator with the Americans and, for Iraqis, a premier who was willing to take on his allies if necessary. He won provincial elections early last year. The threat of a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims seemed to have been averted, and Iraq had what many of its citizens felt it had always needed: an authoritarian leader who ruled the country with a heavy hand.
The series of serious attacks since August have, to an extent, diminished this reputation, but al-Maliki remains the most popular politician in Iraq. Back in 2007, American Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack wrote that al-Maliki was a “weak man in a weak position.” That description no longer applies. The determination with which Maliki drove Shiite militias out of the southern city of Basra and fought Kurdish peshmerga fighters, the tenacity with which he convinced the outgoing US President George W. Bush to agree to a faster withdrawal of US troops, and the coolness with which he attempted to block a shoe that was thrown at Bush during a news conference — these are all achievements and impressions that could help secure reelection for al-Maliki.
It is a bad sign, though, that two of his main challengers in this election are the same two politicians who were among his strongest contenders in the 2005 vote. It’s a fact that shows that the underlying conflicts that took Iraq to the brink of civil war and partition remain unresolved, as Shiite Iran and Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors contend for dominance in Iraq. Chalabi and Allawi each symbolize one of the sides in this conflict.
Bizarre Transformation
For Western observers, Chalabi is Maliki’s most surprising adversary. The upper-class and at times flamboyant Chalabi, who was a key player in postwar Iraq, has undergone an amazing transformation. From being a close ally of the Bush administration’s hawks in Washington, who pressured the US to invade Iraq on the strength of notoriously unreliable intelligence sources, he has turned into the most successful lobbyist for Tehran’s mullah-controlled regime in Baghdad.
Chalabi is responsible for a manipulation that already calls the legitimacy of the election into question. Even though he is a candidate himself, Chalabi, as chairman of the government’s Justice and Accountability Commission, ordered more than 500 of the original 6,000 candidates to be disqualified from running for office — on the strength of vague claims, which have never been specified or made public, of their “closeness” to the banned Baath Party.
The most prominent politician on the list of banned candidates, which was eventually whittled down to just over 170 names, is the secular Sunni Saleh al-Mutlaq, 58, head of the National Dialogue Front. He is a man on whom the Americans had pinned hopes this time around. They believed that al-Mutlaq could prevent a large-scale boycott of the election by Iraq’s Sunni minority, something which happened in 2005 and which created a catastrophic imbalance in Iraq’s political structure.
When a dejected and angry al-Mutlaq tried, along with the other politicians on the blacklist, to contest his exclusion, he received a cryptic note from Chalabi’s commission, telling him that he would be well advised not to even try, because the evidence against him was “very strong.”
Fears of Flare-Up in Terrorism
Washington, which intends to withdraw its troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, believes it is critical that Sunnis participate in the election. For the Americans, the hard-fought stability in the Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin is at stake; if it crumbles, terrorism could flare up again in the region.
Not surprisingly, Washington has been clear in stating its opposition to Chalabi’s Baathist cleansing program. In January, Vice President Joe Biden flew to Baghdad and urged Prime Minister al-Maliki to revoke the list of banned candidates. Last week, General Raymond Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, attacked Chalabi with a vehemence that his predecessors have avoided when dealing with Iraqi politicians. Chalabi, he said, quoting “direct intelligence,” was “clearly (…) influenced by Iran.” Odierno claimed that Chalabi had met in Iran with the commander of the notorious Quds Force, the foreign intelligence service of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The fact that both Biden’s and Odierno’s objections remained completely ineffective shows how strong Chalabi is. “We forgive General Odierno because he captured Saddam,” Chalabi magnanimously wrote in an email to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Al-Maliki also repudiated the American efforts to exert influence, despite having specifically campaigned for Sunni votes in recent months.
Odierno announced that he would circumvent the troop withdrawal agreement, if necessary, and keep his soldiers in Iraq longer than agreed — which would amount to a breach of one of President Barack Obama’s campaign promises.
Back into the ‘Arab System’
Mutlaq’s ouster has directly affected his alliance partner, Ayad Allawi, who is currently Prime Minister al-Maliki’s strongest rival. Although Allawi is a secular Shiite, he is making a concerted effort to court Sunni votes. Two weeks before the election, he embarked on a trip to Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s Sunni neighbors. His goal, Allawi said, was to reintegrate Iraq “into the Arab system,” in other words, to free the country from Iran’s stranglehold.
It is a plausible but dangerous tactic, one which could lead Iraq back to precisely the kind of religious strife that all Iraqi politicians claim to want to overcome. It is still, however, the most reliable means of motivating the base and forging reasonably stable alliances.
Al-Maliki’s attempt to loosen the religious structure of postwar Iraq was too half-hearted, and the forces tugging at his country are too strong. None of the election alliances, which supposedly reach across sectarian lines, will survive the election, predicts the independent candidate Mithal al-Alussi. Already last week, the movement led by Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who lives in Iran, announced that if the outcome of the vote is not to its liking, it will leave the National Iraqi Alliance coalition.
‘Too Late’
In truth, none of its neighbors has an interest in a strong, independent Iraq — neither Shiite Iran nor the dominant Sunni power, Saudi Arabia.
The American influence, however, is now too weak to change anything about the situation. “To covertly go after Iran, we’re too late,” one unnamed US official told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “What we can do is expose.”
Given the situation, the prime minister is likely to be a Shiite again, just as the president will be a Kurd and the speaker of the parliament a Sunni. It is a formula that reflects the demographic reality of Iraq and, to an even greater extent, its religious divisions.
But it is also the formula that has been used to govern Lebanon, a country that hasn’t managed to find peace for decades.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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