It has seemed clear to me for some time now that, despite all the protestations of various US officials that what they most want to see is a “unified” Iraqi government stepping forward, in fact, what they most care about is not the ‘national unity” aspect of the government, but rather that the new Iraqi government NOT be one formed on a basis of commitment to a speedy US withdrawal.
In fact, Ja’afari and Muqtada Sadr are very committed to a unified Iraq– and Sadr has done more than any other Shiite politician to try to keep the links between the country’s Shiite and Sunni populations as strong as possible. (A lot, lot more than, for example, Abdul-Aziz Hakim and his SCIRI party, which as we know has been associated with some of the worst of the anti-Sunni death squads in the country.)
Sadr, in addition, is deeply committed to winning a speedy and complete withdrawal of US occupation forces from his country– this is, indeed, one of the main bases of his political relationship with the Sunnis.
The Americans have been using the Kurdish pols, and others, to continue to block the formation of a government led by Ja’afari, who is currently in alliance with Sadr. (The Americans have never withdrawn their “arrest warrant” against Sadr, the issuance of which back in April 2004 provoked some whole new rounds of very destructive fighting, both at the time and later in 2004.) For some reason, they don’t like Sadr! Perhaps it’s because of his consistently Iraqi-nationalist, anti-occupation stand?
I see that 97 days have now elapsed since Iraq’s “landmark” December election. That’s nearly 14 weeks in which the country has had no clear governance structure, and of course in the absence of such a structure the slide toward greater civil strife has only further continued.
Most recently, Washington has started deploying more actors to try to persuade Ja’afari to “do the right thing” (in Washington’s eyes), and to step down in favor of SCIRI’s favored candidate, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a pro-Washington, pro-privatization person with a very slick political past. These actors have even included, it seems, a group of six US senators now in Baghdad. They were reported by AP to have, “pressured Iraq’s leaders Tuesday to speed up formation of a national unity government, saying American voters were losing patience with Iraqi politicians and increasingly eager to withdraw troops.” (Actually, this last part of the communication probably gave considerable heart to the anti-occupation pols in Baghdad, so it might not have entirely served the Bushies’ purpose… )
But still, the imperial stance adopted by these senators is somewhat breathtaking… That they go trotting off to a foreign country and openly lecture the politicians there on how to run it?
… But of course the really big gun that Washington and its local viceroy, Zal Khalilzad, are now hoping to bring to bear on the Iraqi Shiite pols is political pressure from Teheran. Will this work in the way the US hopes, I wonder? That is, is Teheran going to be both willing and able to pressure Ja’afari to cede in favor of Abdul-Mahdi?
“Willing” is already, in my mind, a big question. And so is “able.” It is probably worth re-reading all the trustworthy sources we have on the relations between Teheran’s rulers and the various strands and personalities within the Iraqi UIA, to gain some guidance on these points.(Help, anyone? Reidar Visser, are you there?)
That AP piece cited above, which is by Vanessa Arrington and not their much more experienced and better-connected Hamza Hendawi, has this interesting tidbit near the end:
Al-Jaafari’s bid for a second term is opposed by Kurds, Sunni Muslims and many secular politicians who claim he cannot unify the country. The Shiite leadership is under heavy pressure to drop him as candidate.
(Not true, by the way! Ja’afari is opposed by both main Kurdish parties, yes– though a little bit of US palm-greasing could swiftly change that situation. But he is certainly not opposed by all the Sunni Muslim pols, or by all the secular politicians. I think Arrington’s claims here are the result of her listening to too much crude US Embassy agitprop.)
But then, she reports this:
Yet interim Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi told reporters after meeting Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Tuesday that “Dr. al-Jaafari is still the (Shiite) Alliance nominee.”
The cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged Abdul-Mahdi and another Iraqi politician — Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite bloc in parliament — to speed things up.
The aim should be to “form a national unity government as soon as possible,” al-Sistani told the men, according to an aide. “Otherwise the people will not forgive you.”
I have to say that the mendacity and Orwellian double-speak of the Bush administration people whenever they say anything about the Iraqis’ government-formation process never cease to amaze me. They go on and on about claiming they want to see a “unified government”, but are meantime stoking the Kurds and everyone else they have any influence with to resist the formation of the one form of unified government that looks both easily achievable and also democratically legitimate– i.e., one led by Ibrahim al-Ja’afari. And they launch all kinds of accusation about Ja’afari’s “divisiveness” while completely minimizing the bad effects of the anti-Sunni divisiveness perpetrated by SCIRI and its allies, as well as (in his day) by Iyad Allawi.
And… and… and…
Meanwhile, here’s a very intriguing quote I found last night when I was reading the March 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker. It’s in an excellent article by Connie Bruck on the Bush administration’s various machinations with Iranian expatriate pols over the years, all of which is certainly well worth reading.
Here’s what she writes on p.54:
James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, told me that in the prewar planning for Iraq “there was an intention that the U.S. would retain troops in Iraq– not for Iraq stabilization, because that was thought not to be needed,[!] but for coercive diplomacy in the region. Meaning Iran and Syria.”
Well, that was then, and now is now. Now, instead of the US being in a position to use “coercive diplomacy” (i.e. diplomacy backed by crude military threats) against Iran, Zal Khalilzad is instead begging Teheran to help him resolve the US’s political problems inside Iraq…
Boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall in these negotiations… But much more than that, I would love to see an empowered, united Iraqi government emerging that is committed to winning Iraq’s real national independence and sending the occupation army home.