Reidar Visser on the UIA balance, contd.

Reidar Visser, the well-informed and judicious Norwegian specialist on the politics inside Iraq’s politically dominant UIA coalition has now almost completed his analysis of the political balance within the UIA in the wake of last month’s elections. You can find it here.
He notes that there will be some further last developments, depending on who in the UIA will get the 19 “compensation seats” the coalition will most likely be awarded as a result of the election’s slightly complex rules.
His data show that, before those compensation seats are distributed, the nationwide distribution of the UIA’s 109 seats looks like this:

    Sadrist (pro-Moqtada): 23%
    SCIRI/Badr: 19%
    Sadrist (Fadila): 13%
    Daawa: 12%
    Daawa (Iraq): 11%
    Independents (& smaller parties): 22%

He has some great additional analysis there, noting quite rightly that (1) Most western analysts have been describing SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim as “the most important man in Iraq”, though they are wrong to do so; (2) The actual balance of power inside the UIA will have huge impact both on inter-sectarian politics in Iraq, and on the federalism question.
I totally don’t have time to comment further on this right now. (I’m still deep in revising my Africa book.) But huge thanks to Reidar for telling me his work is up there, and congratulations to him on what looks like a thorough and extremely informative piece of analysis.
Check it out! And since he doesn’t really have comments there, feel free to discuss it here.

11 thoughts on “Reidar Visser on the UIA balance, contd.”

  1. The results are weird. It’s hard to believe that UIA did so well. All the time they’ve been in pawer they’ve been completely inept at putting a government together. al-Jafaari has seemed completely ineffectual. I would’ve thought the Iraqi public, even the Shi’ites, would’ve turned on UIA and kicked them out.

  2. It might seem weird– but to me, really, it underlines the immense continuing charisma of Ayatollah Sistani. He urged Shiites to vote, and also “not to split their vote”– i.e., to vote the big Shiite list. So it wasn’t basically a vote that evaluated the performance of the Jaafari govt, but one that (1) obeyed Sistani and also (2) compared different visions of what the future Iraq should look like.
    I think that latter aspect of the vote explains a lot more, beyond what’s been happening inside the UIA.

  3. IMO, one likely delusion on the Iraqi situation is to take radical Islamists in general and and UIA in particular as a unified Baath-type political force. Well, sure, it is not true, UIA is essentially multi-factional. So, my understanding is, Cole and Visser just go on repeating this generally obvious fact again an again.

  4. Abdul-Aziz Hakim as “the most important man in Iraq”

    “Think of Sayyid Ayyad, a remarkable man in his mid-forties. who has arrived at a series of conclusions utterly from within the Shiite tradition of Islam, which accept the separation of church and state. He’s on the lists, he’s up for elections, he’s on TV, and he’s a real firebrand. He is a new kind of force speaking a new kind of language, shocking traditional Muslim audiences. He has a very high opinion, for instance, of the American constitution and the Bill of Rights. Many more people like him need to engage in the debate, as well as people like myself. I and others like me can’t break through that wall by themselves; we need help from inside the fortress of Islam.”

    Kanan Makiya

  5. Sadrist (pro-Moqtada): 23%
    SCIRI/Badr: 19%……………………Iranians
    Sadrist (Fadila): 13%
    Daawa: 12%………………………..Iranians
    Daawa (Iraq): 11%………………..Pro Iranians
    Independents (& smaller parties): 22%

    “We fasted for three months; then we broke our fast with an onion.” – Iraqi proverb
    What’s a bout these Parties
    Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talabani
    Kurdistan Democratic Party, Masood Barazani
    Kurdistan Islamic Union
    Assyrian Democratic Movement

    ELECTIONMONITOR IRAQ

  6. “I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the service of [their] country.”

    Great New Podheretz Piece on Iraq

  11. So now that Sadr has more parliamentarians truly loyal to him than does bargain-master Hakim, when will there be a vote on a timetable to kick out the Yankees? And can SCIRI’s ministers prevent that vote from having any effect?
    Why can’t everyone see what SCIRI’s game is? They were publicly circumspect about Iran until it became obvious that America couldn’t rebuild the country. SCIRI surely gets bribes from both Americans and Iranians for all sorts of activities, so it keeps both sides thinking they’re in the running for a big payday. The movie version was called Yojimbo, and the ending wasn’t pretty.
    Anyone who dares quote Tom Paine to support this war better look at who’s wearing the Red coats now.

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