Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

“They shoot hostage-rescuers, don’t they?” is not the only news story in Iraq these days. (Though I must admit it’s a pretty darn’ shocking one.)
But check out Zaineb Naji’s latest piece for IWPR from Baghdad, as well. It’s titled Political uncertainty continues. It’s a succinct and professional summary of the situation.
Of course she also mentions the crucial future deadlines against which the current prolongation of political uncertainty needs to be measured:

Under the country’s interim law, the constitution must be drafted by August 15, in order to go to a public referendum in October.
The law does allow for a six-month extension, but that would delay a general election scheduled for December, and the timetable for the eventual withdrawal of Coalition troops from Iraq. [emphasis by HC]

Well, surprise, surprise.
Too bad that last year, when “wunderkind” and Presidential Medal of Freedom (or whatever) winner Jerry Bremer was cobbling together his extremely long-drawn-out and complex scheme for the transition, he made this business of actually forming the transitional government based on January’s nationwide elections so cumbersome, eh?
Even worse that the UN apparently let him get away with it.
And so, Iraq carries on with no legitimately constituted government. How long before Sistani calls people out into the streets to protest the continuing obstructionism, I wonder? (And also, perhaps, the accuracy of the ballot-counting process itself, about which allegations continue to swirl and about which his people are certainly well informed…)

Check out the new element near the top of the sidebar on the JWN front page.
It’s about a week since I started getting very curious as to why the actual implementation of the people’s will , as expressed in the late-January election, was taking so long to get implemented.
Now, I’m even curiouser.
(Regarding that counter on the sidebar, I haven’t figured out how to get it to update itself automatically, so I counted until tomorrow, Thursday. If anyone knows how to get it to update automatically, could you post some suitable HTML code or links to same in the comments? Thanks!)

My dear friend Juan Cole has recently devoted quite some space on his blog to his own and others’ parsings of the notorious “Transitional Administrative Law” (TAL) that desert fashion maven Jerry Bremer tried to foist onto the proud people of Iraq back in March 2004.
Well, many of us have spent time in the past parsing the 62 articles of that egregious document. I did so myself, back here and on other occasions around then, too.
But now, I ask myself, Why bother?
What was the “status” of that so-called “law”, anyway?
(Answer: It was a text adopted by an “Interim Governing Council” that had been appointed by the occupying force.)
Why on earth should that have any status at all, in comparison with, for example, the will of the people?
Okay, okay, I do know that the “will of the people” is a tough concept to necessarily operationalize or get a good grasp of. It is frequently fickle; it can be capricious or disturbingly majoritarian. But discerning it and operationalizing it are, at the end of the day, what democracy and good governance are all about.
And yes, I know too that there were many, many flaws in the election that was held three and a half weeks ago now, in Iraq…
But still, despite those many evident flaws– which included the use by members of at least one list of governmental powers and resources to try to steer the election their way; the overwhelming presence of occupation forces in many parts of the country; the intimidation campaign launched by militant anti-occupation (and militant anti-Shiite) forces; and the many, many reported irregularities or worse in the conduct of the election– Yet, despite all those flaws, in the January 30 elections the Iraqi people spoke.
The clarity of what they said was necessarily muffled and distorted by all the flaws described right there. But still, I think we can hear a couple of clear things in what they said. Which were, for a significant majority of them, these two statements:

Continue reading “Parsing Iraq’s TAL: why bother?”

I just want to note, even if belatedly, the terrible human cost the Iraqi Shiites have been paying over their recent commemoration of Ashoura, in terms of the more than four-score members of their community killed by suicide bombers who seemed to be targeting the Shiites gathered for their holy rites.
This year, as last year.
I also want to note the magnificent self-restraint with which the members and leaders of the Shiite community have so far responded to thse tragedies.
My goodness, can you imagine the carnage of revenge attacks that might under other circumstances have ensued?
Condolences to so very many bereaved families. Prayers for the ability of the leaders of all of Iraq’s communities to be able to find a decent and workable national entente.
(And some big questions about the responsibility of the occupying power for these continuing, gross lapses in public security…. nearly two years after the occupation started…)

Here is a fascinating new post from Riverbend yesterday. (Thanks to commenter Frank for alerting me to this one– and also, its predecessor from River, which is likewise worth reading.)
River sounds a lot less personally sanguine about Iraq’s prospects after the election than Faiza (cautiously) has been.
River has her own take on the Islamic dress-code issue there, which is definitely worth reading. I also really love the folksy, intimate way she’s able to describe daily scenes in her life to us. She’s been posting a bit more frequently, recently. Let’s hope that trend continues.
Please, River!
I just want to paste in the concluding words on this recent post of hers:

It

Faiza has a good new English-language post up, containing her reflections on the post-election scene. She is still, like many thousands of Iraqis, hanging around in a neighboring country– in her case, Jordan.
This post is something she wrote last Saturday. The whole post is definitely worth reading. But if you can’t catch the whole thing, at least pay attention to what this wise woman writes about her country’s immediate priorities:

I think Iraq needs another year, until the picture gets clearer. The new government faces a lot of challenges, like the security file, which is the most important issue that needs to be treated seriously, and logically, then there is the administrational corruption file, and putting logical solutions to stop it from spreading, and thus ruining the country, then there is the issue of writing the new constitution, then, lifting up the broken economy of the country, bringing life back to it, starting building the infrastructure projects of the country, (water, electricity, sewage lines,…), and all other related projects of schools and hospitals, in the far areas deprived of such services. Iraq is in need of a long term building and constructing plan, for tens of years, and is in need of the Iraqi

I was just reading this story from AP, which attributed to the Iraqi Electoral Commission the same final distribution of the 275 seats in the National Assembly that AP had reported– without attribution to the IEC– yesterday.
Namely that the Sistanist UIA list gets 140 seats, the Kurdish list get 75, the Allawist get 40, etc etc.
However, I think that further down the list of lists there may be a question about the allocation of one seat that the IEC gave to the Sadrist list (one of three that they allocated to it), which I believe may more legitimately have gone to the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Here is my table of calculations for how I believe the seats were being (or should have been) allocated.
The easiest way to understand the counting is to read the table from left to right. First of all, the number of votes recorded for each significantly-sized list is divided by 30,750, which as I wrote yesterday is the raw “number of votes per seat”. After that first distribution of seats, 256 seats have been clearly distributed. You then have two sets of votes that have not yet “contributed” to a seat: all the “remainders” from the dividing process for the bigger lists, plus all the actual votes from all the smaller lists.
Each list should, obviously, get to “keep” its own remainders (my column D). But down at the bottom of the list of lists, there are many lists that by no means of remainder-distribution at all could end up qualifying for a seat. I put that cut-off point after #13, the Iraqi Islamic Party, principally in view of the fact that the IIP clearly had gained more than half of a “seat”‘s-worth of votes, and the next list on the list clearly had not.
So I then redistributed among lists 1-13 all the votes that had not been cast for any of lists 1-13, on a basis proportional to the number of votes each of those lists had originally won (my column E there).
I then added the sums of columns D and E to arrive at a total for an allocation of votes at “round 2”. That was column F. Those votes were then aggregated into “seats”, using the same divisor as in round 1, generating the additional seats given in column G.
But there are still remainders, and still four seats to be allocated.
At that point, I allocated those four remaining seats to the lists with the highest remainders in column H, which were lists 1, 2, 9, and 13. Of those four “lucky” lists, #13 (the IIP) had by far the highest remainder in column H. That’s why I certainly would have allocated one of those four “third round” seats to the IIP.
During the IEC’s whole remainder-distribution process, it notably did not give a seat to the IIP; but it apparently gave one to the Sadrist list. I really do not understand why, since I can’t see any way of fairly organizing the remainder-distribution system that would have given them an extra seat there.
Plus, I repeat, the IIP had actually won more than 50% (actually, 69.4%) of the votes it would have needed to win a seat without any remainders redistributed to it, at all.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see the IEC’s explanation of its process.
(P.S. It feels so good to be scrying vote-tallying processes in Iraq rather than body counts.)

So finally, two whole weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, we have preliminary results of the Jan 30 election.
That story, from AP, gave only the (preliminary) totals for the three biggest blocs that ran. Another AP story, to which I can’t find a link, said the total number of votes cast came to 8.456 million.
So if you take the (preliminary) numbers listed for the three biggie lists, then you find that, of the ballots cast:

the Sistanist, UIA list got 48.2%,
the Kurdish list got 25.7%, and
Allawi’s list got 13.8%.

Of course, the final percentages should be a little higher than this, in each case, once we know how many of the “ballots cast” were judged to be “invalid”.
[Update, Sun. mid-afternoon, NYC time: I just learned here that the 8.456 million figure is the figure for valid votes cast, so those percentages there HOLD. Also, the number of votes required to win one seat in the Assembly is about 30,750. Down at the bottom of this, I’ll try to give my estimates for seat numbers.]
Interesting how tantalizingly close to 50% the UIA list got. I should imagine that if they can make a decent working coalition with pro-Moqtada or other small Shiite parties, they would come in at over 50%, giving them the kind of strong electoral victory that I’m sure Sistani was looking for.
Lots of politics over the days ahead, no doubt. For starters, the IEC isn’t going to announce “verified” final results for another three days, after it has sorted out all outstanding challenges.
And then, there’s the politics of coalition building. Allawi was described in this Hayat story as offering PUK leader Jalal Talabani the presidency if he would enter a coalition with him. The WaPo today had a story about Ahmad Chalabi, who’s a little low down on the UIA list, desperately wooing Moqtada.
The big question remains. That is,how can the next administration (whoever ends up heading it: I’m kind of expecting Ibrahim Jaafari) win broad enough legitimacy both for itself, and for the constitution-writing process that desperately needs to get underway?
I’d say, legitimacy-wise, that whoever heads the new (still interim) administration needs to find a credible way to be able to draw in significant representatives of the Sunni community, as well as of major different strands of the Shiite community. It goes without saying that the Kurds, who are very well organized at the political level, also have to be– and will be– inside the tent.
An attempt to form a Shiite-Kurdish coalition to the exclusion of the Sunnis can’t work.
Okay, here, added in mid-afternoon Sunday, New York time, are the votes and rough seat counts (out of 275 seats), as taken from this AP story:

Continue reading “UIA at around 50%”

I’ve been running around so much recently that I hadn’t checked Faiza’s blog for a while. I should have. Last Friday she posted this, about the elections. She’s as wise as usual.
She was writing from Amman, where she’s been for three weeks or so now, doing some business but also taking a break from the uncertainties inside Iraq.
Anyway, without further ado, over to Faiza:

Good morning
The world is more concerned of the Iraqi elections than the poor Iraqis themselves.
People in Iraq are busy with their lives details and in solving the problems of water and electricity, and dealing with the lack of gas for cars and cooking, in addition to the daily horror of the bombed cars, explosions, death and destruction… and the gangs of thieves and kidnappers.
All of this in Iraq, while the international media stations are trying to find answers to questions like: What’s the ration of voters? Are the elections going to be held or not? Who is for the elections and who is against it? Who are the names in the winning elections lists? How many people are on each list?
Hmmmmmmm….

Continue reading “Faiza’s view of elections”

(1) Why has Iyad Allawi been acting as though he has already won the election?
(2) Why did George Bush call Allawi to “congratulate” him on the election?
(3) Why did Iraqi journalists covering the election in Baghdad and Amara get beaten up and otherwise harrassed by Iraqi security forces?
(4) Why did some polling stations report they did not get enough–or in some cases, any– ballot sheets in time for the elections, and what can be done about such irregularities?
(5) How do we feel about reports that at least some voters voted only because they thought things were still the same as in Saddam’s day, when people were badly punished for not “voting”?
(6) Why is the counting expected to take “up to ten days”, and will there be a credibly reliable and clearly documented chain of custody for all the ballot papers from the time of voting until then?
(7) Will the announced “losers” of the election have good reason to trust the integrity of the whole process, and therefore to explain to their followers that they should concede power (and patronage, and potential oil mega-$$) gracefully to the “winners”?
(8) Does anyone have any reason to believe that this election will have results much different from the much-lauded (in the US) 1967 poll in Vietnam? (Thanks to NeoDude for that link).
… Just asking.