Author: Helena

The excellent and careful Norwegian historian of modern Iraq Reidar Visser has just produced an extremely helpful analysis of the evolution of the concept of the centralized Iraqi state as it developed in the post-Ottoman era… and he continues this analysis right through the the post-2003 era, concluding with some references to the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki on the topic.
In current (post-March 2003) Iraqi politics this issue has assumed particular importance because of the strong preference of the country’s US occupiers (and also the two makor Kurdish parties) for a radical decentralization and geographic devolution of governing authority in Iraq– a project to which many US analysts misleadingly give the name “federalization”.
In support of this decentralization/devolution project, many commentators have alleged that the entire construct of “Iraq” was a purely manufactured creation of the British– and that therefore there is something “natural”, appropriate, and almost inevitable about the deconstruction of that state.
I note that this argument about the “artificiality” of colonial-era boundaries is one that could– potentially– be applied to states in many parts of the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. (Oh, also the United States and if you think about it, just about every state in the world…) But nowhere else that I know has this argument been used so insistently, as it has with reference to Iraq, to try to justify the radical deconstruction of a central state.
Anyway, into this discussion, Visser is now injecting a much-needed degree of solidly informed historical realism.
He writes:

anyone who researches primary materials from the early 1900s soon understands that it is impossible to deny the existence of Iraq as a geographical and social–historical category at the time. For “Iraq” is simply omnipresent in those sources. Foreign consuls, be they Persians or British, would write about “Iraq”. Ottoman administrators, from the sultan’s advisors down to office clerks in the central registries for state correspondence, referred to “Iraq” as a familiar category which required no further explanation. Not least, people living on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris spoke of an area they knew as Iraq. In Basra in 1910, the municipality agreed on a proposal to erect a statue of the Ottoman statesman Midhat Pasha (1822–1883), to keep alive the memory of “his many services to Iraq” in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is little doubt that some kind of Iraq existed, and that this concept was intelligible to ordinary people. Both Sunnis and Shiite Muslims used it to refer to the combined area of the Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, at least north to Samarra. To what extent the popularity of the concept abated further north is a moot point. Some local writers had used expressions like “the Kurdish tribes among the people of Iraq” as early as in the nineteenth century (this would seem to imply that the concept was indeed in use north of Samarra as well); the Ottomans, on the other hand, except for a brief interlude in the early Young Turk period, maintained a distinction between an “Iraq” consisting of Basra and Baghdad and the area to the north which was mostly denoted through its administrative name, the province of Mosul. At any rate it is clear that the standard depiction of Iraq as something that was created by the British from scratch – without any pre-modern roots and essentially forced on the local population – is untenable. The British role was mainly to join Mosul to the two provinces of Basra and Baghdad, whose inhabitants for their part were already familiar with a larger concept of Iraq.
In its most vulgar form, the “constructivist” interpretation of modern Iraq has become allied to an even more problematic ethno-religious caricature map of the country. Mosul, it is claimed, was “Kurdish”; Baghdad, “Sunni Arab”; Basra, “Shiite Arab” or even “Shiite, with a strong orientation towards Persia”. Such models are another unfortunate side effect of twenty-first–century journalism being projected onto atlases of the past. They overlook the fact that the provincial border between Basra and Baghdad was located far south towards the Gulf (it ran eastwards from Nasiriyya to Amara), so that the majority of Shiite Muslims in the area were in fact residents of the province of Baghdad. Similarly, Mosul was highly complex in terms of ethnicity, with large groups of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens, Yazidis and Christians alongside the Kurds. But if this complexity is overlooked, the “artificiality” thesis perpetuates itself: cross-regional cooperation, if taken note of at all, is dismissed as the result of outsiders employing brute force against a population which for their part are portrayed as being locked in internecine antagonisms, unable to conceive of any sort of shared super-regional identity.

I would argue, moreover, that this tendency by many western writers to think of the different “ethnic” and or religious/denominational groupings within Iraq as being locked into internecine antagonism derives from the west-European experience of states having been generally been either created and conceived of along strictly mono-ethnic lines. People who conceive of states in this way find it hard even to imagine states that are formed on multi-ethnic lines. They tend to essentialize ethnicity as an immutable attribute of human experience/practice and to imagine that the world’s different ethnicities must always be competing against each other in one way o0r another…
Visser writes about the decision of the British colonial administrators, who after WW1 had been “awarded” (or, had grabbed) the area of Iraq and ruled it under a League of Nations “mandate”, to create a single, unitary state comprising the previously existing Ottoman regions of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. He notes– and this is of some wry significance today– that one of the goals of the British administrators in doing this was to dilute the influence that the country’s quietly powerful Shiite clerics could exert over its governance…
He notes the determination with which the British pursued their project of creating a unitary state for the whole area (including Mosul), and also the fact that the British used military force including aerial bombardment in their pursuit of it.
He adds this:

Continue reading “Iraqi state centralism historically and for Jawad al-Maliki”

So it is Jawad al-Maliki as UIA nominee. He is a Daawa person.
I’ve been traveling and busy for the past 48 hours. I flew back into Philadelphia yesterday, from Amman. I’m here in Philly for a meeting today, then back home to Virginia tonight.
When I posted here Thursday, I wrote, ” 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.”
Okay, so Jaafari stepping down was not as “remote” a possibility as I had thought… But Daawa has still won the big battle of wills against Talabani and the Americans.
On Juan Cole’s blog today, he has an amazing collection of links, extracts from documents, and fulltext translations of documents related to Maliki’s nomination, and the reaction of various Iraqi parties to it. His putting these materials up into the public blogosphere is a real service to all of us who seek informed discussion of events there.
On another note, I saw before I left Amman yesterday that the “Iraqi religious leaders gathering” they’d been planning there, for today, has been postponed. Understandably, given the close involvement of many of those religious leaders in Iraq’s political affairs.
I gotta run. I do have one more thing I want to post here before I go off to my meetings. I’ll try to write some more commentary on the Maliki nomination a little later over the weekend.

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…

At the UNU reception here yesterday, my Afghan-Australian colleague Amin Seikal made a comment that I found very thought-provoking though it’s probably something other people have thought a lot more about previously, than I have. We were talking informally about Iraq. (This was shortly after my lengthy, canapé-balancing chat with Queen Noor.) Anyway Amin and I were talking about best-case and worst-case scenarios for the upcoming US withdrawal from Iraq…
He said that the Bushites were presumably looking for a withdrawal with some shred of honor. I said they would more likely, at this point, be looking for a withdrawal in which the degree of dishonor was minimized. He said, “Yes, we should be looking most closely at the analogy with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan– not at Vietnam.”
The Soviet army first went into Afghanistan in force in December 1979. This, from Wikipedia, about the events that led up to their withdrawal nearly a decade later:

Informal negotiations for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had been underway since 1982. In 1988, the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the United States and Soviet Union serving as guarantors, signed an agreement settling the major differences between them known as the Geneva accords. The United Nations set up a special Mission to oversee the process.
In this way, [Soviet puppet PM Mohammad] Najibullah had stabilized his political position enough to begin matching Moscow’s moves toward withdrawal. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced.
Among other things the Geneva accords identified [mandated? ~HC] the U.S. and Soviet non-intervention with internal affairs of Pakistan and Afghanistan and a timetable for full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989.
Just over 15,000 Soviet troops were killed from 1979 through 1989, in addition to many hundreds of vehicles and aircraft destroyed/shot down. An estimated one million Afghans died as a result of the invasion during this period.

Not all was roses, of course, after that withdrawal– either for Afghanistan or for the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, the attempts to build a stable government all faltered; the country collapsed into terribly damaging civil war; and the “victorious” west just abandoned it and allowed it to continue on the downward spiral that eventually resulted in the Taliban coming in and being seen by many Afghan nationals as a force that could at least bring an end to the rampant warlordism throughout the country…
And for the Soviet Union, the puncturing of the Soviets’ regime pride in Afghanistran, as well as the massive drain that the hopeless war had constituted on the Soviet budget, both alike contributed the further unraveling of Soviet power, and the the dismantling first of all of the Warsaw Pact (November 1989), and then of the Soviet Union itself, in 1993.
Sic transit gloria mundi. I certainly wish a much better outcome than that for both the Iraqi and the US citizenries. As for the Bushites’ project of extending and maintaining US hegemony over this vital portion of the world– that should be ended as soon as possible.