Category: Iraq-2005-Q4

Many journos in the mainstream media had noted that Iraqi PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki went to Najaf Thursday to meet with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and that Sistani’s office afterwards issued a statement calling for the dismantling of the country’s powerful militias. (E.g., here.). But it has taken long-time Sistani-watcher Reidar Visser to– once again– help us put that visit into a broader and more informative context.
Having studied Sistani’s latest statement (bayan) carefully, Visser writes in this helpful piece of analysis on his website that,

The breaking news from Najaf is … [that] Sistani indicates that he could once more become more involved in Iraqi politics: the religious leadership will “watch”, “keep an eye on” or “monitor” (the Arabic verb raqaba in form III) governmental performance in the future. This is quite unprecedented in Sistani’s scholarship. Sistani has earlier signalled attachment to ideas similar to those of the Persian constitutional revolution of the early 1900s, when Shiite clerics fought to acquire a supervisory role which would allow them to scrutinise the Islamic legitimacy of legislation passed by parliament. This, on the other hand, signals a possible extension of jurisdiction, to the point where direct criticism of the executive becomes theoretically possible.

This does indeed seem very important– both over the long term and in the more immediate future. I assume, for example, that the religious leadership– i.e., Sistani himself– will be monitoring the performance of the government in the crucial field of negotiating the speedy withdrawal of US and allied troops, among other things? (Sistani has long been on record as favoring a speedy and complete US withdrawal.)
In his latest analysis, Visser refers back to the much longer analysis of Sistani’s role that he published in mid-March. (JWN commentary and discussion on that, here.) In the earlier analysis, Visser had written that whereas between June 2003 and November 2004 Sistani had sustained an active (and extremely influential) behind-the-scenes engagement in Iraqi politics, after November 2004 that engagement seemed to drop off sharply.
In that context, therefore, perhaps we could say today that “The breaking news from Najaf is that there is breaking news from Najaf”?
I went to Sistani’s website and looked, for example, at the portal they have there to Arabic-language press comments about him. There were already four items up there with today’s date– showing that his people are tracking current media coverage of him quite closely. Before that, the earlier items they displayed had these dates: 4 April, 9 March (two items), 2 March, 22 February (two items), 20 February, 11 December (four items), 10 December, 9 December…
Well, there are many possible explanations for their having posted press items there so sporadically between Devember 11 and April 29. (Believe me, as a blogger, I could give you plenty of explanations for sporadicity!) But it is kind of notable how extremely disengaged they seemed to have been in that period surrounding and following the December 15 elections…
In his latest analysis, Visser discussed that period of quietism and Sistani’s apparent decision to end it thus:

There are several possible reasons for this apparent resurgence of political activity on the part of Sistani. In early 2006, he kept silent during the divisive internal Shiite struggle over who should be the United Iraqi Alliance premier candidate. This seemed to indicate that he considered the matter to be outside his proper sphere of activity; indeed, had he wished to impose a candidate of his own he could easily have done so and the fractious Shiite alliance would have avoided a very public embarrassment and a delay in the political process that played directly into the hands of anti-Shiite forces and terrorists. But now, even though Sistani has increasingly sought to keep a certain distance from the United Iraqi Alliance, matters may have reached a point where he deems the deteriorating security situation to be a direct threat to the reputation of his religious leadership.

I would add to this that perhaps, in addition, Sistani saw the deteriorating security situation as harmful to something else he seems to hold very dear, namely the national unity of Iraq?
Anyway, demobilizing the country’s numerous militias will clearly be a very tough undertaking. In the Shia community there are the Badr Brigades, the Mahdi Army, Fadila, etc… In the Sunni community there are some smaller but often much more lethal armed organizations. And then, up in Kurdistan, there are the pesh merga, whose leaders have shown no readiness whatsoever to have them dissolved… And meantime, the US plan to build up the “national army” under US trainers and US political commissars has been continuing to founder. (In this intriguing piece in today’s WaPo, Jonathan Finer writes that US soldiers in the northern Iraq town of Hawijah “have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies”– and gives many details of such incidents.)
Clearly, then, if there is to be a demobilization of the Iraqi militias– along with, as the best strategy for this, the integration of their operationally capable members into a new, unfied Iraqi security force– then this will have to come about as a result of intra-Iraqi political reconciliation, rather than through any (quite phantasmagorical) concept of “US leadership” of the process.
Can the Iraqis do this, despite all the blood spilled, and the evident depth of the political disagreements and the distrust among them? Yes. As our friends in South Africa and elsewhere have shown us, even opposing political and military forces that have been fighting each other for a long time and with great lethality and the imposition of truly terrible suffering can reach an agreement– provided it is based on a shared concept of national unity, national citizenship, and the broader national good… And yes, they can do this largely by themselves, without requiring the input or the professed “leadership” of meddling outsiders… Especially not, if the outsiders in question have a proven track record of having stirred up internal differences and tensions; and if they still quite fail to disavow having any longterm territorial or political ambitions of their own inside the country in question!
In this very necessary political process of intra-Iraqi reconciliation and the reconstruction of all the organs of Iraqi national power, Ayatollah Sistani’s active involvement can make a big difference for the better. (Especially if he also works hard to reassure the country’s Sunni Muslims about his role.) Given the attachment the Ayatollah has already shown in the past to the ideals of Iraqi national unity and national independence, I for one am delighted that he seems to have decided to re-engage with Iraqi politics.

Once again I want to express appreciation to Reidar Visser for his work on this. Also, since I find the handwriting used in the Arabic text of Sistani’s latest bayan very difficult to read, I’d be extremely grateful if any JWN reader could read that last portion of the bayan, where Visser says he writes about the new “monitoring” role he envisions, and post an English-language translation for us all here. Thanks! Plus if anyone could point me to a crib-sheet for the Islamic dating system used in the bayanat (but not the press postings), that would also make my life easier… ~HC

So now the Iraqi Kurds are reportedly going to be welcoming tour groups from Israel. Between that and their conclusion of a successful oil-exploration deal with Norway’s DNO oil company, the Kurdistan “regional” authority sure seems to be acting like an independent state already, doesn’t it?
Reidar Visser has a good analysis of some of the constitutional issues involved in the oil-exploration deal, here. As he notes, Article 110 of the (still by no means finalized) Iraqi constitution states that,

“The federal and the producing regional and governorate authorities shall jointly [italics added, ma‘an in the Arabic] devise the necessary strategic policies for the development [italics added] of the oil and gas wealth in a way that achieves the highest possible benefit for the Iraqi people…” Additionally, the question of resource ownership remains unresolved altogether. The studiously ambiguous article 108 simply reads, “oil and gas are the property of the entire Iraqi population, in all the regions and governorates”.

Regarding control over borders, I am pretty near certain that the constitution still reserves that to the central government.
But what central government, you might ask?

As I noted here, back on Tuesday, one of the “meta-narratives” of what’s going on in Iraqi politics these days is the contest over the validity of the election conducted on December 15.
This contest has seen two quick new developments in the past couple of days. Yesterday, Craig Jenness, the Canadian national who’s been heading the UN’s election-support team in Iraq, declared publicly, at a press conference in Baghdad, that: “The United Nations is of the view that these elections were transparent and credible.”
Well, that sure sounded definitive. Case closed, you might think?
Think again.
Today, AP’s Patrick Quinn has reported that a new international group will now be traveling to Iraq to review the elections. The new group (or indeed, perhaps it isn’t totally new?), known as the the International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE) will reportedly include two representatives from the Arab League, one member of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and a respected European academic, acording to (apparently) a spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, described as “Iraq’s leading Sunni Arab group.”
Quinn also wrote that IMIE already did some monitoring of the elections, in Baghdad, where it had been “assisted by monitors from countries of the European Union working under IMIE’s umbrella.”
He wrote that the IMIE review team,

will travel to Iraq at the invitation of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said a review could “evaluate what happened during the elections and what’s going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.”
… The invitation to review the process and about 1,500 complaints lodged by candidates and parties was welcomed by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who said “these experts will be arriving immediately and we are ready to assist them, if needed.”

I find this interesting at a number of levels. The dispute over the validity of the election process is the main political issue, right now, that divides Iraq’s Sunni Arabs from its Shiite Arabs. Most Shiite pols (and Ayatollah Sistani) have thus far insisted adamantly that the process– which gave their main party, the UIA, a strong victory– was entirely fair, and the Sunnis have contested its fairness with equal or greater vehemence.
As I noted in a comment on this JWN post, Dec. 20, the possible divergence of views between the Sunni parties and the Sadrist trend within the UIA over the validity of the elections could indeed be a factor that prevents these two trends from taking any broader joint action in the political field… And if those two trends are unable to work together, then we might as well all say goodbye to any hopes for the survival of a single Iraqi state.
The Kurds, meanwhile, are probably just as happy as anything to see this issue dividing Iraq’s large majority of ethnic Arabs into two bitterly anatagonistic factions.
The story of the new, non-UN “international election-monitoring group” is interesting, too, for what it tells us about Khalilzad’s current strategies. He has visited both Saudi Arabia and one of the small Arab Gulf countries in the past couple of days– I forget which. (Though you’d never know about any of that if you read only the US mainstream media, whose reporting from Iraq has been really terrible over the past couple of weeks.)
Khalilzad seems to be trying hard to bring at least some of the Iraqi Sunni political class into the political tent that he’s creating in Baghdad. That’s been really difficult, and was made harder by the fact that the Sunni pols judged that the many complaints they had lodged about election fraud with the Iraqi electoral commission had not been considered with anything like enough seriousness by the commission.
I wonder, btw, why Craig Jenness was so quick off the mark to issue his apparent “certificate of a good practice” in public yesterday? Given the chaotic security situation inside Iraq before, during, and since the election, I honestly wonder on what basis Jenness felt able to render such a speedy and near-definitive judgment on the matter? But anyway, the UN’s election-monitoring unit has been in internal chaos for the past couple of years, culminating in the abrupt termination of its Director, Carina Perelli, just a few weeks ago, on charges of gross mismanagement, so it is hard to know what actual expertise the unit still retains at this point.
So anyway, Khalilzad almost certainly helped– with the aid of his hosts in the Gulf countries he’s been visiting– to cook up the plan for the “new”, and notably non-UN, election review process. My main guess is that he’s playing desperately for time… trying to find any way possible to find a way to, (a) get some credible Sunni pols into the next government and (b) persuade the UIA to let this happen.
All the very technical business about whether there was electoral fraud or not would, I am sure, be rapidly swept under the carpet if only he could find a way to bring about the political outcome he seeks. (So much for “democracy”.)
Meanwhile, many Sunni pols have been feeling deeply deceived by the thus-far-declared results of the election. And as this report from today’s al-Hayat makes clear, the militants inside the Sunni community have been quick off the mark to deride and threaten all the Sunni pols who had argued that participating in the elections could bring the Sunni community results of some serious political value.
Basically, that article (bylined Mushriq Abbas) says that since the election results have started to come out, opinion in the Sunni community has swung strongly toward the hardliners. Abbas reported that “the Partisans of the Sunna” (which he describes as close to al-Qaeda-in-Iraq) and the “Army of the Mujaheds” (which he describes as close to the “Islamic Army”) issued their first ever joint declaration that stated derisively that “The mountain of the elections labored mightily and gave birth to a mouse!” and “Those who ran after a mirage [i.e. who took part in the elections] have ended up only as chess pieces in the hands of their masters.”
The article also says that the declaration’s authors admitted that they had agreed to suspend armed operations during the period of the elections (as he describes it, this was “in deference to the popular will”) but that now, essentially all bets were off, and all mujaheds should just once again place their lives in the hands of God (i.e., resume their armed jihad.)
… So anyway, that’s just a little part of what Khalilzad now finds himself dealing with. It would be hard for anyone to be able to find a way to persuade all the different groupings and interests that have emerged inside Iraq to come to some agreement at this point. But an American viceroy, representing a government that has been responsible for inflicting massive suffering and harm on the Iraqi Sunni community continuously over the past 33 months, is probably one of the worst-placed mediators one could imagine.

[I just re-arranged the order in what follows, late Wednesday. Same content though. ~HC]
The two big narratives
As I see it, there are two big mega-stories currently dominating Iraqi politics, with a lot of criss-crossing other narratives going on within each of them, as well as between them.
The two big ones are:

(1) the continuing contest over the legitimacy of the election process itself, and
(2) the contest within the victorious Shiite mega-list over the policies it should pursue (as well as over the linked issue of who gets which job in the new government).

Regarding the second of those narratives, JWN readers would do well to go down to this recent post, where the well-informed Norwegian researcher Reidar Vissar has now posted two additional comments that describe his own increasing understanding of the power-balances within the UIA… Bottom line there: SCIRI is actually not as strong inside the UIA as many people seem to assume. Check out Vissar’s analysis there!
Regarding the first narrative, Iyad Allawi and the Sunni parties have been very busy in recent days marshaling the forces that question the integrity of major aspects of the election process.
Those parties have formed a new coalition called Mu’tamar al-Rafideen lil-Intikhabat al-Muzawwafa (Maram– the Conference of those rejecting forged elections), that has called for a re-run of the vote in Baghdad Province and elsewhere. Maram pols recently held a planning meeting in Amman, Jordan (a significant location for them); and today they organized a demonstration in western Baghdad which drew either “at least 5,000 particiapnts” (AFP), or “more than 10,000” (AP).
I think it’s great that Sunnis, secularists, and supporters of a non-sectarian Iraqi state pursue their grievances through the means of peaceful demonstrations (and of course, the ballot-box.) I have to say, though, that on the scale of events of a similar type in Iraq since March 2003, these numbers seem pitifully low. The Sadrists have put hundreds of thousands of supporters onto the streets at the drop of a hat, a number of times; and Sistani pulled out ways more than a million back in (was it?) late 2003.
Juan Cole wrote today that the Maram gathering in Amman agreed to, “inform the Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, of their demands that the election be held all over again in the provinces where widespread fraud occurred, especially in the northern cities and in Basra and Baghdad… They are also planning to write a letter to Kofi Annan.”
He also cited al-Sharq al-Awsat as reporting that Maram pols Allawi, Adnan Dulaimi, and Saleh Mutlaq had decided “to boycott parliamentary sessions in an effort to paralyze it if it will not heed their demands.”
Juan’s comment on this boycott plan was this:

Continue reading “Post-election Iraq, Part 2”

Reidar Vissar is a Norwegian historian whose knowledge of southern Iraq I have admired in the past. Today he has a fascinating new text on his website, in which he analyzes the results as released so far of the elections, as viewed primarily in the south. His work makes a good, much more detailed complement to the post I put up here on Tuesday with some gleanings of info about the politics within the UIA list.
His first big comment is that there, as elsewhere, Allawi’s more secular list has lost out big-time to the UIA. (I wonder to what extent Allawi’s better showing last January and poorer showing this time are due to the well-known advantages of incumbency? To a large extent, I expect.)
Vissar looks in detail at Basra and two other provinces and writes this:

the UIA looks set to walk away with 13 of 16 seats in Basra, 10 (possibly 11) of 12 in Dhi Qar, and 6 out of 7 in Maysan. Allawi’s list will probably get 2 seats in Basra and 1 in each of the two neighbouring governorates, whereas an independent Sadrist grouping (list 631) will compete fiercely with the UIA for the last seat in Dhi Qar. Finally, the Iraqi Accord Front, a mostly Sunni party with Islamist leanings, seems certain to get one seat in Basra, where the poor performance of Allawi’s allies may indicate that Sunnis who boycotted in January now have voted largely along sectarian lines. (The more secular Sunni alternative, list 667, could only muster around 1,000 voters across the three southern governorates).

He then turns his attention to the balances inside the UIA:

It is often assumed that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is the leading force within the UIA. A closer look at the affiliations of the representatives likely to represent Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar shows just how misleading this interpretation is for the south. Only 2 out of the 29 UIA candidates whose seats seem secure have a clear association with SCIRI, and an additional two from the institutionally independent Badr Brigades can be considered as being close to SCIRI. That means that more than 80% of UIA deputies from the south will have other, non-SCIRI, loyalties. Of these, 7 are Sadrists loyal to the radical Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr, 6 are members of the Fadila Party (a competing Sadrist party whose spiritual guiding light is the cleric Muhammad al-Yaqubi) 5 belong to a breakaway faction of the Daawa Party, 3 are from the mother branch of that organisation (also the party of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister), and then there are 4 Islamist independents.

So that would give us:

SCIRI + pro-SCIRI: 4
Sadrists (both flavors): 13
Daawa + breakaway: 8 (don’t know if the breakaway might have swung to Sadr or elsewhere, though?)

Vissar goes on to assess the effects of this outcome on the plans the SCIRI leaders have declared, to try to create a Shiite “super-region” out of 9 or so of Iraq’s existing provinces (governorates.) He notes that elsewhere in the UIA there is support for other outcomes– principally, either keeping the powers of the central state strong, or the establishment of a ‘small’, south-concentrated region of three governorates, rather than SCIRI’s favored super-region.
His conclusion is:

despite the indications of an overwhelming UIA election victory in the south, the tripartite model of an ethnically divided Iraq federation may still get competition from older federal designs. These include the non-sectarian “administrative” federation of 5–7 medium-sized entities (with which the small-sized 3-governorate southern region plan would harmonise) as well as the long-established scheme for a bi-national Arab–Kurdish union. The election results also have implications for Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim and SCIRI: they may yet find themselves facing some quite unexpected obstacles in their struggle for supremacy over the Islamist political scene among Iraq’s Shiites.

I think that in order to get a more definitive picture of the politics within the UIA and their ramifications, we still need to get a breakdown of the votes and UIA candidates in other regions– especially Baghdad!– that is as detailed as the one Vissar provides here for the south. But if his figures and analysis are more or less accurate (given that the final results are not yet in), and the patterns he describes in the three southern provinces are representative of what has happened in other strongly UIA parts of the country, then I think his conclusions are sound.
Thanks so much for sending me that link, Reidar! (Nice site you have there, too.)
Does anyone out there have the kind of additional information we need?

Can the Dec. 15 election in Iraq help lead to some form of intra-Iraqi accommodation, and thus to significant progress toward US troop withdrawal and national independence?
Most (but not all) indications so far seem discouraging on this score. The conduct of the election has been hotly contested by, among others, the mainly-Sunni “Iraqi Accordance Front” (IAF) and also the more secular list headed by longtime US ally Iyad Allawi. Of these two contestations, that from the IAF is the one with the greatest potential to prevent the reaching of a national accommodation.
We probably don’t know the true dimensions of the complaint from the IAF yet. AP’s Jason Straziuso reports from Baghdad that the IAF officials have so far “concentrated their protests on results from Baghdad province, the biggest electoral district.” Early returns indicated that the “result” in Baghdad province was that the big Shiite list, the UIA, had won about 59% of the vote, the IAF around 19%, and Allawi’s list around 14%.
But we haven’t even heard any estimates yet of the “result” in the other provinces where Sunnis are present in large numbers and where the IAF might also rightly expect to win a lot of votes. And so far, as Straziuso reports, the IAF hasn’t started to focus on their complaints from those provinces.
Given the total lockdown the country experienced for the days around the election itself, and the very substantial lockdown that the US and their allied forces maintain, in general, in and around most of the country’s heavily Sunni cities, it must be extremely difficult for the IAF’s national leadership even to communicate with its representatives in those areas, let alone to gather any systematic details about the nature of complaints from the many voting precincts in those cities.
According to Straziuso, the IAF warned of, “grave repercussions on security and political stability” if the mistakes claimed (in Baghdad) so far were not corrected. He quoted Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the front, as saying, “we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad. … If this demand is not met, then we will resort to other measures.”
However, Moqtada Sadr, the activist, generally anti-US Shiite cleric who is both on the UIA list and an advocate of strong links with the Sunnis, has reportedly lauded the results of the elections as released so far. This Dec. 19 edition of IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor” summarizes a report from Al-Sabah that said this:

The young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the participation of Sunni Arabs in the elections enhanced the political process. He added that the wide participation of Iraqis in the recent election reflected the vitality of the Iraqi people. Sadr said the people will decide the government’s future. He emphasized that he supports any list that will better serve the people and any government that works for Iraq’s independence. The electoral victory is a victory for Iraq, Sadr added.

The way I read this, it seems likely that Sadr feels that his people did well in the elections– perhaps especially in and around Baghdad, where he has a strong base of support. A particularly strong result for the UIA list in Baghdad would presumably give Sadr a lot more bargaining power in the crucial post-election bargaining for power that is going on right now inside the UIA coalition. (It’s a strange feature of the electoral system that has been cobbled together in Iraq over the past 18 months that people vote for a list without the order of the actual candidates who are part of that list having been agreed and advertised in advance.)
I’ve been trying to read today’s Al-Hayat in Arabic to figure out what might be happening inside the UIA right now. But I don’t really have time to do a good job… (Help, Salah, Shirin, anyone?) Anyway, toward the end of this article there , it says,

… sources close to the UIA confirmed that disagreements had broken out between its principal parties over the position of prime minister. And the sources, which preferred not to be named, told al-Hayat that, “The sharp disagreements over the premiership between the Daawa Party led by Ibrahim Jaafari and SCIRI, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, have not yet been resolved.”
And they added that SCIRI rejected this [unclear what], referring to “its bigger mass following and its larger number of seats and that if it hadn’t been for SCIRI the UIA would only gotten half as many votes”. And they noted that, “the other disagreements center on the terms offered by the representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr in the list and which are represented by the need not to deny positions [i.e. jobs] of soveriegnty and ministerial [responsibility] and the participation of all the winning lists regardless of their ministerial weight, in the formation of a government of national salvation.”
And the sources confirmed that, according to the contacts that the American administration in Iraq, as represented by its ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the [contest over the] premiership is reserved between Adel Abdul-Mahdi [of SCIRI] and Iyad Allawi and that Zad [i.e. Khalilzad] doesn’t support the candidacy of Ibrahim Jaafari, and he prefers to save the security-related ministries for parties that don’t have militias…

We could also note that Jaafari’s (out-going) administration has really been hobbled in recent days by the (US-imposed) decision it took the day after lat week’s election, to increase fuel prices by around 2,000%…
Anyway, there is clearly a lot of politics going on inside the UIA there… SCIRI head Hakim has been quoted in Hayat and elsewhere as saying some pretty triumphalist things about how the UIA has now definitievly won the election so they can go ahead and intensify their “de-Baathification” campaign. That would seem to be a big obstacle to Moqtada Sadr’s aim of finding a good entente with the Sunnis…
Any further contributions that commenters can make to providing good sources, links, and translations about the current politics inside the UIA (or even just improving my rapid little piece of translation there) would be really great. Thanks, friends!

From AP’s Jason Straziuso in Baghdad, this morning, writing about the official complaints that have been filed about the conduct of last Thursday’s election:

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said there had been 20 “red” — or serious — complaints as of Monday that could affect the outcome.
“Final results will not be announced until those red complaints are looked at,” he said.

But I thought we were being told that responsibility for running the elections was in the hands of the all-Iraqi “Independent Election Commission”?
This is, of course, the same picture that prevails across the entire gamut of governance responsibilities inside US-and-UK-occupied Iraq. In the conduct of the elections. In the conduct of the Saddam trial. In the conduct of “security” and military policy. In the allocation of budgets… The occupying power is in fact— and indeed, still also under international law– in charge. But this occupying power (the US) likes to make it appear that it’s the Iraqi collaborators who are calling the shots…
Just until things get tough, and then Big Brother Khalilzad steps in immediately to call the shots.

Buried at the bottom of this report in the Dec 12 WaPo is the dryly presented news that unidentified “authorities”, presumably American,

have identified more than 1,000 detention centers across Iraq.

More than 1,000. That makes it at least 1,001, right?

That little piece of information was in a report on a raid by troops from one Iraqi government body on a detention center run by another Iraqi government body, in Baghdad last Thursday. The raiders discovered 625 prisoners in the detention center, some of whom had been very badly tortured. (Thirteen were taken directly to a hospital.)

And this is the “new Iraq” that the US has brought into the world???

Words fail me.

With four days left to the next Iraqi election, we should look at what’s happening to the lives of the six million people who live in its capital, Baghdad.
Three weeks or so ago– in the aftermath of the revelations of the anti-Sunni torture houses in Baghdad, I became very troubled by the situation in the city. I heard several reports from friends of the widespread incidence of sectarian “cleansing” in various city neighborhoods.
But maybe the generally pro-coexistence stance of the Sadrists was sufficiently strong to put a brake on that process? In this nice piece of reporting yesterday, the WaPo’s Anthony Shadid– back in Baghdad! good!– described some rides he’d taken in one of the many passenger minivans that, he says, still traverse the city’s many different kinds of neighborhoods… Go read it to get an idea of how the conversation ran among the religiously and ethnically mixed group of people– okay, make that, men– whom he rode with recently.
But then, on the other hand, there’s this report, in tomorrow’s WaPo… It tells of the revelation of yet another Interior Ministry torture house in the city:

An Iraqi official with firsthand knowledge of the search said that at least 12 of the 13 prisoners had been subjected to “severe torture,” including sessions of electric shock and episodes that left them with broken bones.
“Two of them showed me their nails, and they were gone,” the official said on condition of anonymity because of security concerns…
Investigators said they found 625 prisoners at the center but declined to give details about them. Most of the detainees found at the secret prison last month were Sunni Arabs who had been picked up by forces of the Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry.
“The team discovered a number of problems, which the ministries of Interior and Human Rights are working together to correct,” the statement said. “The facility was overcrowded: As a result, the Ministry of Justice has agreed to receive 75 detainees from this facility at Rusafa Prison; Iraqi judges released 56 detainees directly following the inspection. . . . Thirteen of the detainees were removed from the detention facility to receive medical treatment.”
…Last week, the Interior Ministry fired its top human rights official, Nouri Nouri, without providing an explanation.
Sunni political leaders charge that similar incidents of torture are occurring at other Interior Ministry detention facilities and have identified some of the sites by name.
Shiite political leaders say the U.S. military frequently visits the facilities and suggest that American authorities would know about any abuse.
Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered military commanders to come up with clear rules for how U.S. forces should respond if they witness detainee abuse. The order followed an exchange between Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, at a news conference Nov. 29.
Pace said then that it was “absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted to intervene to stop it.”
Rumsfeld said, “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.”
Pace responded, “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.”
U.S. officials have said the FBI and the U.S. military are aiding the prison investigation. Authorities have identified more than 1,000 detention centers across Iraq.

How many? 1,000? Good God almighty.

I’ve been meaning for some time now to write something about the very interesting and wel-informed study that Marina Ottaway of the Carnegia Endowment published three weeks ago about the prospects for stability in Iraq. The study is called Back from the brink: A strategy for Iraq, and you can read the PDF version here
One reason I think the study’s very valuable is that Marina is a very level-headed, non-ideological person who’s done a lot of studies of deep-rooted political transitions elsewhere, particularly in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. For the past few years she’s been helping to run the Carnegie Endowment’s “Democracy and the Rule of Law Program”, which has focused very heavily on the Middle East, and which publishes the generally calm and informative Arab Reform Bulletin.
Anyway, in Back from the Brink Marina argues, basically, that the constitution/reform process that Iraq has gone through so far has left the country in a very perilous condition:

The political system that the United States has helped set up in Iraq—not the one it envisaged, to be sure, but the one that is emerging as a result of Iraq’s realities and poor U.S. policy choices—is a house of cards. Iraq could easily splinter, with Kurds and Shias focusing inward on their own regions and abandoning Sunni provinces to turn Iraq into the equivalent of a failed state where nobody is in control and civil war and ethnic cleansing escalate. Before withdrawing its troops, the United States must do what it can to ensure that the political system of weak federalism that has emerged, while not ideal, is at least workable. That means helping to form a viable Sunni region.

She notes that,

Since 2003, Iraq has undergone a process that has unfortunately become quite common in multiethnic or multireligion countries when an authoritarian regime is removed. Politics becomes not competition among parties advocating different ideas and programs, but conflict among ethnic or confessional groups.

She argues that, whatever you think of this phenomenon, you need to accept it as, now, an existing fact of political life in Iraq– but that its negative consequences (especially for the Sunnis) need to be minimized. In particular, she argues for a strong US role in helping the Sunnis to set up their own viable “super-region” within the emerging “federal” (i.e. highly decentralized) political system in Iraq.
She identifies two critical areas in which the US needs to exert political pressure to this end. One is to encourage Iraqis to revise the approach the present (interim) constitution adopts to the division of of revenues from new (as opposed to existing) oil and gas fields. At present, the constitution gives the newly emerging “regions” control of new oil revenues, while the central government retains control only of revenue streams from the existing– in some cases nearly pumped-out fields.
Ottaway writes:

The U.S. needs to promote broad negotiations on the issue now so that Sunnis can form their own region and strengthen their autonomy. The issue is too important to be discussed by a small committee or decided by the parliament by a simple majority vote. All Iraqis need to understand the implications of not reaching an agreement on the issue of the distribution of oil
revenue. Without contravening the newly approved constitution, the United States should encourage the Iraqi government to set up immediately a broad-based advisory commission to discuss the issue and make recommendations to the parliament. The new parliament will eventually make the decision, but the discussion needs to start as soon as possible and be as broad as possible. (p.5)

Note that Kanan Makiya had also, in his NYT piece that I blogged about earlier today, argued for the deletion of present Article 109, the one that allocates new (not, as he wrote “extra”) oil revenues to the regions, rather than the central state. As he argued there, “There is no defensible case for imposing special reparations on the Sunni populace for the crimes of Iraq’s former leaders.”
Marina Ottaway, in Back from the Brink, also very helpfully reminds us of the procedure that the interim constitution decreed for the inclusion of any amendments to its existing text:

The constitution approved on October 15, 2005, is difficult to amend for several reasons. First, amendments must be approved by two-thirds of the Council of Representatives (the parliament) and by the majority of citizens in a referendum and signed by the president. Second, the sections on Fundamental Principles and Rights and Liberties cannot be amended at all for a period of two successive electoral terms—a minimum of eight years. Third, amendments that take away power from the regions can only be amended with the approval of the legislative authority of the region and with the approval of the majority of the region’s citizens in a referendum.
An agreement reached on the eve of the referendum, however, creates a temporary exceptional process to amend the constitution after the December 15 election. On a one-time basis, the new Council of Representatives will be able to set up a committee to draft amendments within four months. The amendments must be approved by a simple rather than a two-thirds majority of the council and then submitted to another national popular referendum.

So basically, for the first four months– after the election? or after the formation of the post-election government? does anyone know?– amendments will need only a simple majority in parliament plus a simple majority in a nation-wide referendum. After that, it becomes harder.
The other key obstacle she sees, in addition to the new-oil-$$ issue, to the emrgence of a viable Sunni “region” is, “the lack of clearly recognized leaders among Sunnis.”
She says, quite realistically, that, “This is not a problem the United States can address directly. In fact it is one that Washington could worsen by embracing—and thus discrediting—particular
leaders and organizations.” But she suggests that the Bush administration could help indirectly by relaxing its attitude toward de-Baathification,

and by putting pressure on the Iraqi government to do the same…
The line of exclusion needs to be clearly and rather narrowly defined. And if the prospect of a Sunni region where Baathists are influential is unappealing, it is worth considering that the alternative is even more unappealing—that Sunnis would continue to oppose the federal solution or, worse, to directly support the insurgency.

Her bottom line is this:

The only policy option now is to convince Sunnis to accept federalism and Shias and Kurds to accept that federalism will only work if there is a viable Sunni region.

Then comes this very interesting argument:

By announcing a timetable for withdrawal, the United States would apply some leverage on Shias and Kurds to make the concessions needed to develop a viable Sunni region. The present Shia–Kurdish government can afford to be intransigent as long as it is assured of U.S. protection. If the prospects for U.S. withdrawal were clearly spelled out, Shias and Kurds would have a greater incentive to make concessions to achieve a political solution.
From a military point of view, announcing a timetable for withdrawal has substantial disadvantages. This is not, however, a traditional conflict but a struggle in which political and security goals are inextricably linked and in which political actions are at least as important as the use of force. Politically, a withdrawal timetable could help divide Sunnis and weaken the insurgency, particularly if it is accompanied by clear support for a viable Sunni region and a new policy on de-Baathification. Sunni politicians would be forced to develop a policy that goes beyond opposing U.S. occupation and to focus instead on how to find their place in the new, decentralized Iraq. Former Baathists and many ordinary Sunnis who lean toward the insurgency
because they do not see a future for themselves in the new Iraq might also be enticed toward a more constructive, forward-looking position.
…Using the leverage of an announced timetable for withdrawal, the United States may be able to push Iraqis to use the agreed upon additional period of negotiating to address the issue of how Iraq can be made viable as a weak federal state. It will not be easy, but there are no other options left.

I have argued, too, that the prospect of an imminent withdrawal of the US troops can do a lot to encourage Iraqis to start think clearly about how they will start to deal with each other once the excuse/distraction/shield of a US presence is absent.
One thing that’s interesting about Marina’s argument, in comparison with the generally fairly parallel one laid out today by Kanan Makiya, has to do with the question of agency. Marina– writing for a primarily US-policy audience– is arguing for a high degree of US agency in trying to shift Iraqi politics in the direction she seeks. Kanan– writing for an undefined audience– is arguing that the existing Iraqi politicans need to take the lead in pioneering these shifts.
But here’s the interesting part: Marina is arguing for this robust US political role very rapidly, in the lead-up to the announced US troop withdrawal that she advocates. But Kanan is much more “resigned to” (or perhaps, desirous of?) a lengthy US troop presence. He writes about a period of ten years being “the time necessary to crush the insurgency, establish properly accountable institutions of law and order and ensure that those applying for such status have met the criteria.”
In other words, though ostensibly he’s arguing for the agency of the Iraqi pols, in actuality he’s envisioning that they’ll be acting from behind the shield of a large continued troop presence, one of whose tasks will be to “crush the insurgency.” Obviously, that is a much more militarized– and pessimistic– course than the one that Marina advocates.
And in Kanan’s model, too, the entire restructuring of Iraq’s legal and political institutions would be carried out under US tutelage.
What I got from reading Marina’s paper is a sense not that she supports what she calls the “ethnicization” of Iraqi politics, but rather, that she recognizes that it has happened; sees it as to a large extent irreversible (which I’m not so sure about); and sets out a fairly intelligent policy that seeks to minimize the damage from it.
Oh, there is one huge additional problem in this whole business, however… namely, the question of the national capital, Baghdad. In a side-box titled “What about Baghdad?” she writes this:

The constitution states that Baghdad cannot be annexed by any other region but makes no provisions on how it should be governed. If Iraq is divided into a Kurdish, a Shia, and a Sunni region, Baghdad is bound to become a self-governing entity.
It will not be an easy entity to govern. It has more than six million inhabitants, of which an estimated 35 percent are Shia and the rest is divided between Sunni Kurds and Sunni Arabs. In the October 15 referendum, 78 percent of Baghdadis voted in favor of the constitution, showing they accept the idea of decentralized government even if they do not know what it will mean for the city.
With its mixed population, Baghdad could easily turn into the flash point for largescale civil conflict. Or it could become a model of coexistence, if some security can be achieved and some real thought is given to how to govern it—which, so far, is an utterly neglected issue.

H’mm, that means that actually, the population of the city would be almost evenly divided among the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Personally, I doubt the Kurds make up that big a proportion of the city. I would say the city’s population is likely to have a larger Shiite population much larger than 35%.
But anyway, with six million inhabitants and with its enormous historic and symbolic role, Baghdad can’t just be shunted to one side in this whole discussion of “federalization” (which, as I’ve pointed out many times, is quite the incorrect term term to us…. What’s happening is “decentralization”, “breakup”, or “devolution” of the powers of a central state; not the “federation” of a number of pre-existing smaller entities.)
But now, I see that I need to make the rest of this discussion about Baghdad into yet another new post here…