Daawa-Sadr bloc on brink of victory?

In Iraq, it looks as though the Jaafari-Sadr bloc within the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) now seems poised, fnally, to cement its victory in the political battle against the US machinators. That, at least is my reading of what Juan Cole was writing very early today— especially in his commentary on this article in today’s Az-Zaman.
In this context, it occurs to me that the nasty street battles in the Baghdad district of al-Adhamiyeh may just be a fizzling reaguard attempt at divide-and-rule between Sunnis and Shiites, undertaken by (or at the very least, enthusiastically stoked by) the US military authorities as they face the possibility that at the political level inside Iraq they are about to lose their campaign to prevent the Jaafari-Sadr bloc from taking power?
Muqtada Sadr is, of course, a longtime bete noire for the Americans, and continues to be one because of his insistence on seeing a speedy withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq– a program in which Jaafari has reportedly joined him and that has apparently received the strong but quiet backing of the leading Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The broader Shiite parliamentary bloc, the UIA, is reportedly meeting in Baghdad this morning, and will there decide whether to attend the parliament session scheduled for this afternoon.
In order for Iraq to have a government at this point, under the Constitution adopted last October the following needs to happen:

(1) The Assembly elected Dec 15– 126 days ago!– needs to convene, and to elect a Speaker and two deputy speakers. The Assembly thus becomes duly constituted.
(2) The duly constituted Assembly then needs to elect a President (and some vice-presidents?) by a 2/3 majority.
(3) Within 15 days thereafter, the President names the “nominee” of the largest bloc within the Assembly to be the PM.
(4) The PM-designate then has 30 days to assemble a government and define its program, before which deadline he (or she) needs to present both the government list and the program to the Assembly and win a simple-majority vote for their approval.

The Zaman report says that the major parties have now agreed on the candidates to put forward for the first of these steps. As Juan translates it, the final agreement on the list has not been reached, but the Sunni “Iraqi Accord Front” has put forward two (alternate) candidates; the Kurdish Alliance has put forward one; and the UIA has put forward three (alternates). Basically, though, it seems the major issues in this political step have now been resolved.
Basic agreement seems also to have been reached regarding step 2, the designation of the President and the Vicer-Presidents. As Juan writes, quoting Az-Zaman:

[UIA spokesman, Sami] Al-Askari alleges that the United Iraqi Alliance has dropped its earlier opposition to Tariq al-Hashimi, and is now sanguine about his running for vice president. The Shiite UIA candidate will be Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
(Cole: I presume that the reemergence of al-Hashimi comes because he has dropped his opposition to Jaafari as prime minister. Al-Hayat says that Dulaimi admitted that the Sunnis of the Iraqi Accord Front had offered to drop al-Hashimi’s candidacy if the Shiites would drop Jaafari. But it was the Shiites who had the upper hand, and they forced al-Hashimi out to make a point, without giving up anything at all. The Shiites played hard ball on this one).

Quoting Sami al-Askari– who is also a UIA MP– Juan continues:

He said that Iyad Allawi, the secular ex-Baathis Shiite and former interim PM, had no luck in his bid to become a vice president, given these party decisions.
He said that the Dawa Party [which had earlier indicated that it might consider alternatives to Jaafari] met on Wednesday and took a final decision to back Jaafari for prime minister.

And then, here comes something particularly crucial… Ever since Dec. 15, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani has been the spearhead of the internal Iraqi opposition to Jaafari’s nomination. Indeed, throughout the past four months it’s been hard to say who’s been using whom in the anti-Jaafari campaign, between Talabani and the Americans. Talabani’s opposition to Jaafari has been based on the latter’s reported insistence that Iraq’s internal boundaries not be redrawn in such a way as to give the large, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish Regional Government…
But now, it seems, the Jaafari-Sadr bloc has been able to win out not only over Allawi (who these days is a political lightweight in Iraq, anyway), but also over Talabani. And this, because of the constitutional provision that requires Talabani to get a 2/3 majority in order to win the state presidency that he evidently covets.
Juan continues his rendering of the Zaman piece thus:

Al-Askari said that the United Iraqi Alliance will do a deal with Jalal Talabani, who wants to be president. Talabani needs a 2/3s majority in parliament to become president, and cannot get it without the United Iraqi Alliance, which has 128 [of the 275] members and has 4 other MPs who have announced that they will vote with it. Al-Askari says that the UIA will only pledge to support Talabani if he retracts his opposition to Jaafari.
(Cole: The Shiite fundamentalists are in striking distance of having a simple majority in parliament, and are much more united, despite some frictions, than their opponents. It was always the case that if they maintained their unity, they would be able to impose their will with regard to the incumbents of high political positions. The attempt made by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and former interim PM Iyad Allawi to marshall the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites against Jaafari appears to have been defeated, by simple steadfastness on the part of the UIA.)

Actually– and this is me, Helena, now– Zal Khalilzad’s attempt was broader than that: he was openly trying to split the UIA down the middle and build up supprt within it for Adel Abdul-Mahdi as the PM candidate. But he failed miserably, winning only three open expressions of opposition to the Jaafari candidacy from all those 128 UIA MPs.
H’mm, those three pro-US “heroes”, whose defections from the pro-Jaafari camp were breathlessly reported by the US media just 2-3 weeks ago, have been staying remarkably quiet recently…
So yes, it has been the UIA’s remarkable defense of its internal unity that has been decisive. As for the success of the Jaafari nomination in the Assembly, it requires of course only 138 votes. The non-UIA parties are not nearly as united as the UIA, and I have always been confident that if the UIA could remain substantially united– as it has– then it would have no trouble finding the other 10 votes of support that it needs. I believe Mithal al-Alusi, a respected political indpendent, has already promised his support.
Also, as Juan notes, once Jaafari becomes reinstated as PM, he’ll have a huge budget (= jobs, patronage) to control, so members of many parties will be lining up to join his government.
… Well, if the political knots over Tarek al-Hashemi and Jalal Talabani’s nominations have really been resolved as per Sami al-Askari’s reported comments, then we could see pretty rapid progress toward formation of a Jaafari-led government. However, even if Jaafari in person is not reconfirmed as PM, I think it has been demonstrated pretty clearly that the balance of political power within the UIA remains strongly with the Daawa-Sadr bloc rather than with SCIRI and the pro-Americans inside the UIA… So even if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.
Which raises the nasty prospect that the US-stoked violence in Adhamiyeh might not be the last attempt at stoking such violence?
Indeed, as Dahr Jamail has noted, the US policy of stoking/enabling sectarian violence to occur, and then offering to step in to the victimized community to help “root out the troublemakers” does sound awfully like a cheap mafia proitection racket, doesn’t it? (Hat-tip to Today in Iraq for that link.)
… All of which makes me really glad that no less a figure than Muqtada Sadr is expected to come here to Jordan for Saturday’s “religious reconciliation in Iraq” meetings that are being convened by King Abdullah with backing from the Arab League.
From the few interactions I’ve had with Jordanians here– mainly professors– I would say there is some serious concern among at least those non-governmental Jordanians that the Shiite Iraqis are somehow “not Arab”, or even that they are all “Iranians”. This is very similar to the anti-Shiite propaganda that was stoked by Saddam Hussein in his time, and if you read the comments that Zeyad of Healing Iraq reported, from “people in the street” in Adhamiyeh in recent days, it also seems pretty widespread there, too.
Jordan, like most other Arab countries, has a strong majority of Sunnis in its national population (and almost 100% of its Muslims are Sunnis). In fact, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon are the only three Arab countries that have a majority of Shiites among their Muslim populations. Anyway, amongst many– but notably not all– Sunni Arab communities and individuals there is considerable distrust of Arab Shiites as conmstituting some kind of possible “fifth column” for an Iranian influence that is seen by many ethnic Arabs as threatening and, well, “different”.
Muqtada Sadr is a clearly Arab and very strongly Iraqi-nationlist Shiite political leader. That’s why it’s good that he is coming to Jordan, and I hope he can do something to reassure Jordanians and other Sunni Arabs that they and their Sunni co-believers inside Iraq have little to fear from the Sadr-Jaafari alliance.
Interestingly, Ayatollah Sistani had been the main Iraqi Shiite personality invited to attend. He sent his regrets– and may well have given his imprimatur to Muqtada’s plan to come, instead. I imagine Sistani is very, very wary of leaving Iraq at this time. The last time he left it– for “heart treatment” that the British doctors said he really needed to have– was in August 2004; and on that occasion the US and UK forces took the opportunity to launch an attack against Muqtada’s forces… Better to stay at home in Najaf this time round, I think…