The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zal Khalilzad, has been working feverishly around the clock (but notably not behind the scenes) to try to make sure that his favored candidate (SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi) gets the premiership of the National Assembly that was elected– let me see– 104 days ago. The UIA bloc, of which SCIRI is a part, is the biggest bloc in the Assembly. But in an internal deliberation in early February the UIA’s parliamentarians determined that its candidate for PM would not be Abdul-Mahdi but would continue to be Ibrahim Ja’afari of the Daawa Party…
Today, the NYT tells us that Khalilzad has escalated his campaign against Ja’afari by telling senior politicians in the UIA that Czar George W. Bush himself, sitting in his distant imperial capital, has now issued a ukaz (edict, fatwa, diktat… ) to the effect that:
- Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister…
The NYT’s Ed Wong reported that Redha Jowad Taki, described as a UIA parliamentarian and an aide to SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim, was one of those who accompanied Hakim to a meeting with Khalilzad last Saturday in which the US viceroy reportedly “told” Hakim,
- to pass on a “personal message from President Bush” to the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari… Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister… It was the first “clear and direct message” from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.
…American officials in Baghdad did not dispute the Shiite politicians’ account of the conversation, though they would not discuss the details of the meeting.
I note here– yet again!– that Wong routinely, throughout this piece, describes Hakim as “the head of the main Shiite political bloc”, though in the February vote the UIA showed that not to be the case.
Referring to Hakim as “the head of the UIA, or “the most powerful politician in Iraq” actually obfuscates the whole story. A casual reader of stories making such designations would be left asking, “If Hakim is indeed ‘the head’ of the UIA bloc, and ‘the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq’, then why on earth is Ibrahim Ja’afari still the UIA’s candidate for PM?”
I note too that there are many Orwellian undertones to the whole story of the US intervention in this whole, extremely lengthy and high-stakes government-formation process in Iraq… In addition to the mere fact of the intervention, that is…
One is that, as I noted in this recent post, Zal and his cohorts keep talking about the need for government that pursues a vision of a “unified” Iraq– but they are hard at work blocking the pol who has the most credibility as a proponent of Iraqi national unity–Moqtada Sadr– from having any influence in the government. (Sadr still has a US ‘arrest warrant’ out against him. He has thrown his considerable political weight behind Ja’afari, who is not a forecful political figure in his own right.)
Another Orwellian undertone is that Zal and his cohorts fulminate in public against the activities of the ‘sectarian militias’– while at the same time they are working hard to bring into the seat of government power SCIRI, which runs the biggest, best-embedded, and most violent of these militias…
These things are not spelled out nearly enough in the MSM. (To say the least!)
At a broader level, though, I am impressed that despite 104 days of the US using all the levers of power at its control in Iraq– US blandishments, promises, bribes, military operations, black operations, etc etc– the UIA has stayed quite steadfast in refusing to allow Czar George and his viceroy to determine who will be the next PM.
In fact, if Zal now has to resort unequivocally to saying– in a meeting with Hakim and his (presumably, all-SCIRI) aides– that Czar George himself doesn’t want Ja’afari in power, then this kind of direct, open intervention is already a mark of how weak and desperate his and the Bush administration’s position has become!
(Bizarre, and to me a sign of weakness, too, that Zal would be seeking to ‘pass on’ this message to Ja’afari through Hakim himself… Actually, extremely bizarre indeed.)
I hope Ja’afari and Sadr both have very good personal-security details.
Also, of course that meeting was Saturday. Sunday the US military attacked (apparently) a Sadrist office/husseiniyah, and after that no UIA pols at all have been prepared to meet with Zal. And notably, it was after Sunday that Hakim’s person, Taki, started talking to the press and spilling the beans about Czar George’s ukaz– presumably as a way of trying to distance SCIRI from any complicity in the anti-Ja’afai campaign. (One can just imagine the conversation: “Ed, I have to tell you that Mr. Hakim was deeply shocked– shocked!– to hear the content of the message the Americans were asking him to transmit”… )
As this piece by Knight-Ridder’s Nancy Youssef and Warren Stroebel tells us, on Tuesday evening,
- Salim al-Maliki, the minister of transportation and a member of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance [can anyone tell us from which party? — HC], said al-Jaafari was still the slate’s candidate.
“We do not accept interference by the United States or any other foreign body because it is an internal decision of United Iraqi Alliance,” al-Maliki said.
Youssef and Stroebel also report there that the US has sent a message to Ayatollah Sistani asking his help in “getting us out of this impasse,” as an unnamed official in Washington was quoted as saying.
What “impasse”? The “impasse” in the government-formation process in Iraq that has existed so far — a fact of Iraqi political life that is now absolutely, indubitably harming the interests of the Iraqi people–is completely a creation of the US’s anti-Jaafari blocking tactics.
These journos refer to “leading Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim”…
But they also, sensibly, wrote this:
- Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University in Washington, called the reported attempts to pressure al-Jafaari to resign “heavy-handed.”
“They have to know that Sistani does not want to be seen as interfering in the political process,” she said. “You’re guaranteed to get the result that you don’t want.”
Helena,
In this passage you asked which party al-Maliki is from:
“Salim al-Maliki, the minister of transportation and a member of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance [can anyone tell us from which party? — HC], said al-Jaafari was still the slate’s candidate.”
My understanding is that the transportation ministry along with health and civil affairs went to Sadr’s group. This would explain the forceful rejection of outside interference.
Isn’t the “impasse” at forming a government a direct consequence of the rules invented by the US (the TAL) requiring a 2/3s majority vote to establish a government? Perhaps someone could clarify this matter.
Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister…
Helena this is the dmocracy you and others like Jonathan and most of the west leader sing.
Good on You For This Democracy.
As Tome Freedman say Iraq never experienced democracy in his life which foolish and misleading this “LIES SPREAD MOUTH” flips the history and fact the birth of the first law was in Babylon by King Hammurabi, teaching the world what the law is and how to protect the nations from the criminals.
Salah I don’t know how you could think that I (or indeed Jonathan) would judge that this action by Mr. Bush’s counts as anything like ‘democracy’. Certainly, I don’t think so.
I completely agree that Iraqi civilizations made a great contribution to the concept of the ‘rule of law’ by being the first to codify and publish the law and try to insist it be equally and fairly applied. This is one crucial underpinning of democracy– but democracy involves a lot of other elements in addition to general respect for the rule of law.
I’m not sure why my name came into this, but for the record, I don’t consider Bush’s action to be democratic.
A quick look at Iraq’s history reveals that government intervention, beginning with the British government’s meddling after World War I, is primarily responsible for the country’s current problems. The British created the artificial state of Iraq from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2006/032106a.html
It is distinctly unhelpful when Western media reiterate the distortion of the relationships between individual UIA factions and Iran. Reuters on 28 March wrote, “[‘Iraqi political sources’] say Jaafari has backing from Iran and note the crucial support he received from Muqtada al-Sadr, an Iranian-backed cleric and militia leader”. Where is the evidence for those alleged links? Muqtada has paid two brief visits to Iran; instantly he gets branded as “pro-Iranian”. Abd al-Mahdi, of course, lived in Tehran for several YEARS, but that somehow seems to escape notice.
I agree Reidar. In fact, a recent article I came across in the MSM stated that Iran was funding the Madhi army. Again, no factual evidence is offered to support the claim. Probably it’s just based on face-value acceptance of statements made by the US military. You have to wonder whether the writers are really interested in finding the truth.
There’s a danger that the US will find a way to break up the UIA and thus leave Iraq without even a majority faction, just to cling to its bases for another few months. The magic of this is that a majority of Iraqis wish we’d go away, yet no government can be formed that will demand it.
It’s always hard to tell in this war what the US’ real agenda is. If it just wants al-Mahdi in to invoke the magic of Milton Friedman and hand the oil fields to Exxon, then it will have to pull its troops out or al-Mahdi will be voted out or assassinated, and then how will Exxon get in to grab the oil? But if it has an irrational lust to keep troops in Iraq no matter what, then it can always bribe, threaten or trick a few party leaders to break up any coalition that might kick out the Occupation, and call it “democracy”.
If the US is turning against the Shia and seeming to ally with Sunnis this month, it’s a cynical and reversible ploy. On odd-numbered months your tax dollars will be used to butcher Shia, and on even-numbered months they will be used to butcher Sunnis, and when enough Iraqis are dead the Occupation will emerge from its bases and grab the oil fields. Iraqis outside the Green Zone better figure this out the 2nd time around because the ones inside sure haven’t.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/786/re11.htm
Press reports indicate the arrest warrant for Sadr was issued by an Iraqi judge.
If you have other information, more details or a link would be helpful.
David,
The order was issued by an Iraqi judge under orders from Bremer. As little true independence from the American occupiers as Iraqis have now, at that time there was not even much of a pretense of independence. It is said that Iraqi officials did not even take a toilet break without permission from their American “advisors” – no doubt an exaggeration, but it gives an idea of the degree of control.
One illustrative incident that comes to mind: In late 2003 I met an American couple who had travelled through Iraq to investigate and record the situation there. They visited the Ministry of Health, and met the Iraqi (nominal) “Minister” who of course had been appointed by Bremer (sorry, his name slips my mind right now). The “Minister” was accompanied most of the time by American “advisors”, who tightly controlled the discussion. When the “advisors” were called aside for a moment the couple asked the “Minister” about health conditions and the state of the health system. The “Minister” glanced around him, and then said it was terrible and getting worse, but to please not ask him to talk about it because it would cause problems for him with the Americans.
I thought that the bogus warrant for al Sadr was suspended in August 2004. Was it re-issued, or were the reports wrong?
link