The narrative that the Bush administration and its apologists have
been trying to peddle regarding Iraq is that a “sovereign” Iraqi
parliament is now in power in Baghdad, and the government confirmed
yesterday by that parliament is now well launched on its task of
restoring peace and order in the country. (And if, um, the Iraqi
government should fail at that– well, that would be their own fault,
wouldn’t it?)
This narrative completely ignores the “elephant in the room” of
Iraqi politics, i.e. the continuing and heavy-handed influence
exercised over the Iraqi parliament and government by US officials,
primarily “Ambassador”– in reality, “Viceroy”– Zalmay Khalilzad.
Indeed, Khalilzad was actually in the chamber yesterday
during the crucial parliamentary session that confirmed PM Maliki’s
(still incomplete) government list. WaPo reporters Nelson Hernandez and
Omar Fekeiki made clear in this
report that Khalilzad was not only present but also helping to
direct and stage-manage events there:
The Iraqi national anthem, “My Homeland,” played in
an endless
loop as politicians slowly gathered. Khalilzad shook hands with Iraqi
leaders as Western security guards looked on.
While a man read a verse from the Koran, Khalilzad talked to
a Sunni leader, then abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned a
few minutes later with Adnan al-Dulaimi and Khalaf al-Elayan, two
leaders of the main Sunni coalition, who both appeared to be reluctant
to attend.
The fact of Khalilzad’s very “active-duty” presence inside the
chamber intrigued me. One of my main points of reference is the
Lebanese parliament, from having watched it throughout many years in
which it was subjected to very heavyhanded interference from (at
different times) both the Syrians and the Israelis.
Throughout all those years one crucial task for the outside
power was to control the outcome of the crucial vote in which the
Beirut parliament elected the country’s president. It always did
this indirectly, through two main mechanisms:
(1) its complete control over physical access to the
parliament
building, and
(2) reliance on a broad network of allies– whether
ideological allies, or allies-for-hire– from among the body of the
parliamentarians.
In my recollection, not once did the local Syrian (or Israeli)
viceroy ever actually have to go inside the parliamentary chamber
in order to direct developments there.
To do so would, after all, give the lie to the whole “story”
about the independence of Lebanon!
And I imagine the same was true in most of the parliaments of
East and Central Europe during the years of Soviet domination… (I
wonder, too, whether the local South African viceroys would actually go
inside the parliaments of the nominally “independent” Bantistans to
direct crucial political developments there?)
It is blindingly clear to me that the fact that Khalilzad felt
he had to go into the chamber (and not just as a passive
“guest” or “observer”) signals a deep failure of Washington’s political
project inside Iraq. If you look at those two mechanisms of indirect
control of a parliament that I identified above, it is clear that the
US forces have completely control physical access to the Iraqi parliament,
which is located inside the “Green Zone”. But what the US
administrators in Iraq evidently lack is any confidence that the
parliamentarians gathered inside the chamber would, if left alone out
of Khalilzad’s sight, act at his bidding.
That, despite the huge amounts of money the US has always had
available to hand out as bribes to Iraqi political figures!
In Lebanon, throughout the long years of Syria’s overlordship
there, financial incentives were a strong feature of parliament’s
every-six-years “election” of a president. It was quite a common
observation that the Lebanese MPs would be engaging in an elaborate
game of financial “chicken”, since the price paid for each individual
MP’s vote would increase steeply as the Syrians (or in 1982, Israelis)
came close to meeting the number needed for the election to succeed–
but once that number had been reliably reached, the price would
suddenly plummet to zero.
Gosh, playing that game that must have been one of the hardest
and most stressful jobs those MPs ever had to do during their very
lengthy terms in power…
But in Iraq, despite the huge amount of money the US
administrators have available, and the evident current penury of most
Iraqis, Khalilzad can’t even be certain he can reliably line up a
parliamentary vote in the direction he wants without being physically
present inside the chamber?? What is happening here???
(This fact actually gives me cause for some real hope that the
parliament is not going to act as merely a rubber-stamp for the
Bushists’ desires and projects in Iraq…)
Also on the topic of this “elephant” in the Iraqi chamber, I
read with interest this
piece by John Burns in today’s NYT.
He writes that, in contrast with the policy the US
administrators adopted in spring 2005 during the long-drawn-out process
Ibrahim Jaafari went through as he formed the Iraqi transitional
government–
This time, American officials played a muscular
role in
vetting and negotiating over the new cabinet. Dismayed at what they
have described as the Jaafari government’s incompetence, American
officials reversed the hands-off approach that characterized American
policy as Mr. Jaafari formed his cabinet in early 2005.
Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President
Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of
national intelligence, was to respect Iraq’s standing as a sovereign
state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government’s
formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.
During these [current] negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities
were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer,
Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the
new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in
Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki,
the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries,
and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign
them up to the American vision of a national unity government.
Um, how about Mr. Maliki’s vision of a national unity government?
I thought he was the Iraqi Prime Minister??
But what about that “muscular” role? What an interesting choice of
adjective. I’d love to have someone specify more precisely what it
means…
Burns tells us how his unnamed “American officials” view the new
PM. He writes that they,
privately hailed the transition of
power from Mr. Jaafari to Mr. Maliki. While the two men have similar
political pedigrees — both are members of a Shiite religious party,
Dawa, which was an early opponent of Mr. Hussein, and both fled Iraq in
the early 1980’s to escape a murderous purge of Dawa loyalists —
American officials who have dealt with both men expect Mr. Maliki to
bring to the post a level of competence, decisiveness and
straightforwardness they say was painfully lacking in Mr. Jaafari.
One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr.
Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari,
who remains the new prime minister’s political superior as Dawa’s
leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government
leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.
Burns is an interesting reporter. He most likely doesn’t know
very much about Iraq at all apart from what the people in the US
administration in Baghdad tell him. But he is well connected to high
officials in the US administration there, and probably reports publicly
on a decent proportion of whatever it is he hears from them.
In that entire article today, he identified not a single
source by name. Instead, in his second paragraph there he indicated
only that it was based on conversations with “a wide range of
[American] officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday’s
events.”
In his lede (lead paragraph), he conveyed what I read as a sense
among these people that the Bushist project in Iraq might well
fail rather badly over the months ahead:
As Iraq’s new government was announced Saturday,
some senior
American military and civilian officials watched from the sidelines,
apprehensive that they were witnessing what might be the last chance to
save the American enterprise in Iraq from a descent into chaos and
civil war.
Actually, though Burns names none of his sources for this article
by name, it is my assumption that one of the sources was most likely Khalilzad
himself. And if not Khalilzad, then one or more of his high-ranking
aides who were given permission by Khalilzad to speak to him.
I conclude this because there is a classic piece of Washingtonian
rear-end-covering included near the end of the article:
American officials temper their criticism of the
Jaafari
government with an acknowledgment that the Bush administration, with
its early hostility to “nation building” after the 2003 invasion, paid
scant attention to the need to help develop governmental competence,
and say that the past three years were largely squandered as a result.
In other words– if and when the whole US project in Iraq falls
apart disastrously, please don’t blame Khalilzad!