More heavy politicking inside the UIA

I got around to reading Juan Cole and a couple of pieces from today’s Al-Hayat– but a little late, today. The Hayat articles (as indicated by Juan) had noted that the Shiite mega-list, the United Iraqi Alliance, has decided to anoint SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim as al-marja’iyyeh as-siyasiyyeh for the list, in return for which SCIRI will drop its insistence on Adel Abdul-Mahdi being prime minister.
Marja’iyeh siyasiyyeh, that is, a “political marja’iyyeh“, is a concept I’ve never come across before. (If anyone else out there has come across it before, please, please elucidate for us in a comment.) Among pious Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere, a marja’ is a religious source of inspiration and object of emulation. In Iraqi Shiism, the marja’iyyeh is a collective noun used to describe both the institution of a collectively exercized marja’-dom and its current most elevated representative, currently Ayatollah Sistani. The adjective “political” added to that indicates that this new role is thought of as one of religio-political guidance, perhaps standing above that of the elected leadership.
Not, I would have thought, a terribly democratic notion?
In this article in today’s Hayat, A SCIRI spokesman is quoted as saying that, “the Alliance will be running the state administration for the next four years, and this necessitates that there be a political marja’iyyeh for all the sides (atraf) both inside the Alliance and outside it to resolve the big problems.”
Well, that doesn’t tell us much about this new position, either. It is, of course, entirely possible that the position of “marja’iyyeh siyasiyyeh” might be a a mere consolation prize, given to Hakim if he has actually already lost out in his battle to have SCIRI and its views dominating the policies of the new government. We have yet to see. But certainly, the analysis that Reidar Visser had done over the past ten days, as shown in the body and comments sections of this JWN post, indicated that SCIRI was not nearly as strong within the UIA as Hakim liked to present it as being, while supporters of Moqtada Sadr were stronger in the UIA than most westerners seemed to understand.
It is quite probable that the jockeying for position among the different trends within the UIA has not been resolved yet. (And of course, the final results of the elections haven’t been announced yet, either.)
I think the outcome of the intra-UIA power struggle will be very important for the course Iraq takes over the coming months and years. Thus far, I see the two poles of the main struggle being occupied by Hakim and Sadr, with the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari straddling somewhere between them. (If any JWN readers can explain the situation even better than this, please do tell us in the comments!)
Hakim and Sadr seem to favor very different approaches to building a nationwide governing coalition. Hakim seems to favor one that is built on pursuing a strong relationship with PUK leader Jalal Talabani. Those two men both favor the radical dismemberment of the Iraqi state and its breakup into “super-regions” endowed with so many powers that if they retain any lasting links with each other at all those would be only the links of a confederation, rather than a federation. Hakim has also seemed quite happy to go along with Talabani’s insistence on bringing the laregly discredited former US-appointed PM Iyad Allawi into a new coalition.
Moqtada Sadr differs from Hakim in all these respects. He seems to have much more of an Iraqi-nationalist sensibility than Hakim does, and has very consistently worked on maintaining and strengthening his links with nationalist (i.e. anti-US) activists inside the Sunni community. His Iraqi-nationalist sensibility seems to have two strands to it: an antipathy for radical dismemberment of the state, and a strong opposition to the US presence and influence. The first of those strands probably makes him very wary of the two big, and very secession-minded Kurdish parties. The second strand fuels his distrust of Allawi. (It was Allawi’s administration, remember, that worked with the Americans to launch vicious anti-Sadrist military operations in both April and August 2004.)
It is not clear to me whether a united UIA might have a chance of forming a governing coalition without the Kurds, but with the nationalist Sunnis and a few other small parties. The biggest hurdle in government formation is the requirement that the parliament muster a 2/3 majority to name the President. That would require 180 votes. Up to now, Talabani has acted as though keeping the “presidency” that he’s occupied since last spring is his right in the next government, as well. (Indeed, he and Hakim were recently reported as reaching an agreement that the presidency’s powers would even be increased!) But it strikes me that Talabani isn’t necessarily a shoo-in for president. If the UIA can really act as a smart and united bloc, they could surely start a nice little bidding war among several different candidates for the presidency… And/or, they could take some steps to cut back the presidency’s presently bloated powers… It does seem very bizarre and anti-democratic that a small ethnic minority like the Kurds would be able to dominate a position in the central state administration that is more powerful than that of the prime minister.
… Well, no doubt we’ll find out much more about all this within the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.