Category: Iraq-2006-Q1

I’ve just gotten the time to read this paper, which Iraqi-Shiite affairs expert Reidar Visser sent me. It is his assessment of the role that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has played in Iraqi politics in recent years– and of the role that Sistani might be expected to continue to play in the future.
Visser is a careful, apparently very knowledgeable historian. This paper, which runs 33 pages of PDF file, single-spaced, is thoroughly documented and (for me) well worth the time it took to give it a fairly careful read. Long-time JWN readers will know that I’ve long been intrigued with trying to understand Sistani’s role– and I’ve made a few of my own guesses, some probably fairly wrong-headed, along the way. (That’s why I really appreciate being able to profit from Visser’s careful scholarship.)
He is fairly adamant about his methodology. In an atmosphere where many people claim on occasion to speak for Sistani, Visser tries to restrict himself to a consideration of the bayans that are issued directly by the Ayatollah himself, usually through his own website. (Interestingly, we learn toward the end of Visser’s paper that the site is maintained by Jawad Shahristani, who is the head of Sistani’s office in Qom, Iran. Visser notes that this “entails certain editorial prerogatives, and asks the “heretical but necessary question” as to whether these prerogatives have allowed Shahristani “to pursue a Sistani policy of his own… [O]nce a pronouncement is produced, the decision whether to publish it or not may well have been controlled from Iran as much as from Iraq.” But he concludes that, “As of today there is however no convincing documentary basis for insinuations of this kind.”– pp.26-27.)
So the main thrust of Visser’s careful study of the website material reveals to him three distinct periods in Sistani’s engagement with overt Iraqi politics: first, a period of general quietism toward political affairs, which lasted from the Saddam era and through around June 2003; then a period of much greater engagement, between June 2003 and October 2004; and finally, from November 2004 until today, “there has been evidence of a return to seclusion and a renewed preoccupation with matters concerning the Shiite faith and the protection of its religious infrastructure.” — p.7.
Visser documents these shifts– and in particular, the strong role that Sistani played in 2004 in overthrowing Bremer’s original “caucus” plan for a transitional government and insisting on the holding of one-person, one-vote elections for both the transitional government and the final government. At the same time, he was making many pronouncements and interventions in favor of Iraq remaining a unitary state, and in favor of the shari’ religious law having a strong role in the Constitution.
In that period, too, Sistani came to issue some interesting bayans on the issue of the wilayat al-faqih (the Rule of the Jurisprudent) in which he seemed to stray very far from the opposition that his own earlier religious mentor, Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Khoei, had evinced toward the concept. Visser writes that though Sistani’s apparent embrace of the concept was greeted with jubilation in Teheran, where many regime people assumed that meant he was bowing to the supremacy of their own faqih there, Ayataollah Khamenei, in fact Sistani never gave any explicit recognition to the identification of Khamanei as faqih. When asked, Who is this faqih? Sistani merely answered, “The just jurisprudent acceptable to all the believers.” Which, Visser says, could even be interpreted as possibly referring to Sistani himself…
But, Visser notes, the period of active (and remarkably effective) engagement in Iraqi politics came to an end at the end of November 2004, and since then Sistani has returned to being a sort of delphic figure who concerns himself mostly with arcane matters of ritual and observance, leaving his followers to guess, and make claims and counter-claims, when it comes to questions of concrete political guidance:

Continue reading “New Visser paper on Sistani’s role”

At a forum here in Boston yesterday, former Nixon advisor Al Haig said that the Bushies are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to “win” the war in Iraq:

“Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don’t do it,” Haig said

Actually, it’s not totally clear to me that Haig was saying there that the US still should be trying toi “apply the full force of the military”– or was the quoted statement perhaps meant as a critique of the Bushies’ past actions? Well, I wasn’t there, so I’ll have to trust the reporting of that AP reporter as to what Haig meant.
Either way, though– what an incredibly stupid, irresponsible, and I would say even borderline criminal statement!
Has Haig forgotten that back in March-April 2003, the US did win a decisive military victory in Iraq? Fat lot of good it did them! This is not now and never has been a war that could be won solely on the battlefield. The application of more forces, even of “every asset of the nation”, whether back in March 2003 or now in 2006, could not have “won” the war if there wasn’t a vision for how to translate that military victory into a political victory.
If Haig was indeed urging that now, in 2006, the US should be applying “every asset of the nation” to the war in Iraq– just exactly what military targets does he advocate that they target? And how, once they’ve achieved that, do they intend to transform that new military situation into a political victory?
At the same event, which was a forum on the Vietnam war held at the Kennedy Library, the ageing Henry Kissinger was also on the platform.
Here’s some of his interaction with questioners from the audience:

He refused to directly respond to a question, submitted by the audience and read by a moderator, that asked if he wanted to apologize for policies that led to so many deaths in Vietnam.
“This is not the occasion,” Kissinger said. “We have to start from the assumption that serious people were making serious decisions. So that’s the sort of question that’s highly inappropriate.”
In another audience question, Kissinger was asked whether he agreed that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and, if so, was he responsible for the 2 million people the Khmer Rouge killed?
“The premise that the bombing of a 5-mile strip led to the rise of Khmer Rouge and the murder of two million people is an example of masochism that is really inexcusable,” he said.

These responses are interesting. Wth regard to the first one, why is his assumption that a suggestion that he apologise for the Vietnam-era deaths is not “serious”? An apology could be an extremely serious political act– as when, for example, President Clinton apologized to the Rwandans for the US’s failure to act to stop the 1994 genocide.
His response to the second question is simply an example of out-and-out evasion of any responsibility.
What a sad, sad old guy.
Here’s what he said about the US invasion of Iraq:

Kissinger also spoke about the war in Iraq, saying he supported the invasion.
“We have a jihadist radical situation,” he said. “If the U.S. fails in Iraq, then the consequences will be that it motivates more to move toward the radical side. This is the challenge.”

What a jumbled argument. In 2002-early 2003, there was no “jihadist radical situation” in Iraq. (Even today, that is not the main thing that’s going on there.) Yes, since April 2003, some very serious “jihadist radical” elements have emerged in Iraq. But that emergence cannot be used, ex post facto, to justify the invasion. And nor can it be used to justify the continued US military occupation of the country– especially since it is precisely under the circumstances of that occupation that the “jihadist radical” elements have emerged.
Why did anyone ever take this sorry old guy’s “intellect” seriously at all? He strikes me as just a muddled, highly irresponsible, imperialistic old bully.

With the whole unfolding tragedy in Iraq, few people have remarked yet on “the dog that didn’t bark” in response to all of this… This dog being… the revamped, up-and-running, almost fully capable New Iraqi Security Forces that we were all assured had many thousands of trained personnel now ready to assure the security of increasing parts of the country.
I’d love to see any reporting that is possible regarding what’s happened to the “Iraqi Security Forces” during the crisis of the past four days. How many units have split along sectarian lines? How many have been successfully deployed? In how many was a deployment attempted but failed? … All those kinds of essential figures.
Scotch-taping together something faintly “credible” called the New Iraqi Security Forces, or whatever, has been an essential dimesnion of the current Bush plan to draw down the US troop level fairly significantly before the November mid-terms… So far, the forces don’t look credible at all as far as I can see.
But we need more information.
(I note that until recently Ayatollah Sistani and other heavyweight leaders in the Shiite community have been urging their followers to join the “Iraqi” forces in response to anti-Shiite attacks. If Sistani is now urging support for tribal levies, instead, as Juan Cole has reported, we might expect to see a further large-scale exodus of Shiites from the “Iraqi” forces.)

In many countries, “Bush Telephone” is a term used for the informal but rapid spreading of wild and crazy rumors.
I just read this AP story, by Jennifer Loven from Washington, that tells us that

President Bush spoke to seven Iraqi political leaders on Saturday in an effort to defuse the sectarian violence that threatens the goal of a self-sufficient Iraq free of U.S. military involvement.

The lucky recipients of these calls were PM Ibrahim Jaafari, SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim (here once again described as “the country’s most powerful Shiite politician” – !), National Assembly president Hajim al-Hassani, Tariq al-Hashemi (of the main Sunni coalition, the Iraqi Accordance Front), Iyad Allawi, Pres. Jalal Talabani, and KDP head Massoud Barzani.
Loven wrote that a spokseman for Bush’s National Security Council, Frederick Jones, told reporters,

“The president congratulated Iraq’s leaders for their strong leadership and their efforts to calm the situation and for their statements against violence and for restraint”…
Bush “encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq’s communities,” Jones said.
… Bush pressed each of the leaders to find a way to restart U.S.-backed negotiations among Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to fashion a permanent government. The largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament [the Iraqi Accordance Front] said Saturday it will reconsider its decision to pull out of the talks if al-Jaafari follows through on promises that the government will act to ease the crisis.
“The president underscored his support for Iraq’s efforts to build a government of national unity,” Jones said.
Bush expressed his condolences for Wednesday’s bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra and the cycle of retaliatory attacks that followed, Jones said.
…The White House chose to focus on the positive and disputed that there had been a resumption in violence [!].

I’d be really intrigued to know (a) How Bush knew what to say on these calls– and what his mental picture was of each of the people he was speaking to; (b) what his mental picture is of the situation in Iraq today; and (c) how these seven hard-pressed Iraqi pols each reacted to the call he received.
On a related note, I see that since Wednesday, one “big story” in much of the MSM has become, “Gosh, look at how important those Shiite militias are!” People are writing this story with a real sense of “discovery” of this (perhaps to them) previously unknown fact.
Perhaps they should have been reading JWN more closely all along. In the days after the fall of Baghdad to the US invasion forces– as today– the most burning issue in most of Iraq was the complete absence of any sense of public security or personal safety… Back on April 12, 2003, I wrote here that,

People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. {Okay, I was still using bold then… Sorry!]
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so…
In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order…
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.

Actually, the whole of that post makes eerily prescient reading today. (Also, this one, and this one from May 2003.)
I wrote the first of those three posts, I remember, while I was sitting in a hotel room in Arusha, Tanzania, on my mission to gather info about the international court established there for Rwanda… And now, here I sit in a hotel room in Jerusalem, gathering info for my upcoming pieces about the situation here in Israel/Palestine. But wherever I am, Iraq still somehow cries out for my concern.

Iraq, which has now lived through 69 post-election days and still has no even faintly accountable national government in sight, witnessed a series of tragedies and tumults yesterday and today.
AP’s Ziad Khalaf has a pretty good compilation of the main ghastly things that happened there today. Primarily, the Golden Dome of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra was brought down by a small teams working around dawn with explosives… That’s the resting place of two of the 12 imams revered by Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere, and the location of one of the last known sightings of the last, ‘lost’ imam, and after news of the dome-demolition spread there were reprisal attacks on what Khalaf estimated were “more than 90 Sunni mosques” in Baghdad and the south.
At least seven people, including three clerics, were killed in these reprisal attacks.

Added Thursday 3:30p.m. GMT: Please note that commenter Salah has put in a list of 128 “destroyed Mosques and Imams killed or assassinated”, in the Sunni community in response for the Askariya Mosque demolition… It’s in Arabic. Salah, that’s a sobering list. It would be great if you could give us a source for it.

In addition, many Shiite demonstrators blamed the US-UK occupation forces for the continued lawlessness in their country.
Khalaf wrote about Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that he,

sent instructions to his followers forbidding attacks on Sunni mosques, especially the major ones in Baghdad. He called for seven days of mourning, his aides said. But he later hinted, as did Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, that religious militias could be given a bigger security role if the government is not capable of protecting holy shrines.

All in all, the current situation inside Iraq seems eerily reminiscent of the situation around a year ago… Then too in the aftermath of an election in which the US’s favored candidate (on both occasions, Allawi) did not win, there was a long and very politically unclear period of inter-administration “transition”, in the course of which the level of violence soared ominously.
There are, however, two main differences between February 2005 and February 2006:

(1) In February 2005, the US occupation authorities still had a ‘plan’ for continued political movement forward… However flawed it might have been as a plan, still it did offer all sides the possibility of further political changes to correct the then-existent problems. Not this year. This year, the ‘government’ that comes in will be IT. It will rule the country for the next four years… And along the way it will also be (a) finalizing all those controversial parts of the Iraqi Constitution, and (b) negotiating the timetable and terms of the US withdrawal. So the stakes are extremely high!
(2) In February 2006, Iraqis are probably even more fed up than they were a year ago with the continued US presence…

One methodological note. In Juan Cole’s account of the most recent events, he refers to the people who blew up the Askariya Mosque– as to those who killed 22 people in a bombing attack against a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad yesterday– as “guerrillas”. I think that term gives these bombers far too much respect. In both cases, the aim was to use attacks deliberately targeted against civilian persons or objects in pursuit of some kind of (unclear) political end. I think the word for that is “terrorism”. It’s heinous when it’s used against Israelis, and it’s heinous when it’s used against Arabs.

Juan Cole has a good post today which is his digest of a long interview that Moqtada Sadr gave to al-Jazeera last night. There’s a huge amount of interesting material there that I would love to analyze at greater length but I’m afraid I don’t have time… I’m working on a special project that JWN readers will most likely be able to profit from from about next Wednesday on. I’ll just note I found these portions particularly interesting:

Muqtada says that he is not himself interested in holding political office. He says that each member of parliament represents all Iraqis. He says he only offers advice to the Sadrist bloc in parliament, which is responsible to the Iraqi people generally.
The thirty Sadrist delegates must follow their own conscience. He said that each of the Sadrist MPs was free to support either Ibrahim Jaafari or Adil Abdul Mahdi. the important things was that they should support someone who insists on the departure of the occupation army.
…He denies that he opposes the principle of provincial confederacies and loose federalism. In fact, he says, it is a principle approved by the Prophet Muhammad. He is worried, however, that establishing this sort of federalism under foreign military occupation could lead to a very bad outcome. One is that there is a danger that the foreigners will take advantage of it to partition Iraq. They will also just take advantage to intervene more heavily in Iraqi affairs. And if there were a partition, he asks, what would happen to the Turkmen or the Christians or the Sabeans (groups too small to have their on provincial confederacies). He says he opposes sectarian confederacies and rejects the idea of a big Shiite provincial confederacy in the south of the country.
Asked about Kirkuk, Muqtada says that the Kurdistan Confederacy was established in the north because of the then dictatorship. He says that when the foreign occupation ends, and a democratic state is established in Iraq, with freedom of belief and freedom of peoples, there will be no reason to maintain a separate provincial confederacy. And it won’t need to demand Kirkuk. Kirkuk belongs to all of Iraq and all must equally benefit from it. He suggests that it be kept as a province and an example of communal harmony, rather than being partitioned by ethnic group.
… Asked where he stands in the conflict between the United States on the one side and Iran and Syria on the other, and what he would do if open conflict broke out, Muqtada replied “I am in the service of Islam. Whatever they need in their difficulties, I will provide it. . . I will defend all Islamic and Arab states.” But, he said, he would have to be asked by those states to intervene. He wouldn’t just volunteer to do it whether they wanted it or not. That, he said, is what is wrong with volunteers coming to Iraq unasked to fight the occupation, and then staying to kill Iraqi civilians.

I think Moqtada is continuing his “powerful politico’s’ regional tour”. He’s in Jordan where I think today he was due to meet with King Abdullah II, having met with the PM there yesterday. H’mm, and to think that just a year or so ago he was one of the US forces’ “Most Wanted criminals” in Iraq… What on earth is happening to US influence in the region? (A question asked in irony.)
Oh well, back there in Baghdad, the US interveners are working desperately hard, it seems, trying to prevent the coming to power of an elected government that is dedicated to seeking a speedy withdrawal of the US forces. That at least is my first reading of this piece of reporting, by nelson Hernandez, in today’s WaPo.
Hernandez writes,

since the Shiites voted to choose Jafari, representatives from Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular parties that include multiple factions said they had met to discuss a broad-based coalition that could potentially overpower the Shiite candidate. The politicians, as well as Western officials, said in interviews that the race for prime minister was far from over.
“It is too early to say who will be the president or the prime minister or anything else,” said Ibrahim Janabi, a member of the secular National Iraqi List. “I think this will take time.”
“We are exploring all possibilities,” said Barham Saleh, a leader of the Kurdish alliance of parties, in a telephone interview just before he headed back into a meeting with other parties on Saturday.

I guess Zal Khalilzad, Iyad Allawi, and a bunch of other US collaborators and opportunists are kind of annoyed that their favorite character inside the UIA, SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi, didn’t get the UIA’s nomination for the PM post.
But the idea that all the non-UIA parties might be able to come together and over-rule the UIA is– provided the UIA people hang together– quite absurd and out of the question.
Much more likely than a bloc that marginalizes a significant portion of the UIA would be a bloc that marginalizes the Kurds– and the Kurds know that.
Oh, here’s AP now running with that, “major obstacles for a Jaafari confirmation” story, as well. Looks like Zal and his buddies are taking advantage of Moqtada’s temporary absence to try to spook the UIA into overturning the Jaafari nomination and going the way they want it to?
Colonial bullying politics really is pathetic sometimes. (But also, very damaging to the peoples colonized.)
Meantime, Iraqis continue not to have a governing admionistration that is accountable to them. The DDI counter here on JWN now stands at 66 days.

The International Crisis Group has a new report out today titled In their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency. It is based on an apparently close reading of the public communications– mainly web-based– of the insurgent groups.
The report contains a wealth of really interesting information and analysis and also contains some grounds for optimism regarding the achievability of a negotiated cessation of war in the country (See below.)
That link there is to a Word version of the 36-page report. There’s also a PDF version. If you’re on a slow connection, you can read at least the Executive Summary at this URL.
This look like a really well-done report. Its authors admit the limitations of looking only at the public utterances of the insurgent groups. But they state quite justifiably that there is indeed real value in looking at these communications closely– and they point out that this is something that the people in the Bush administration have notably failed to do. Indeed, the report says of the US administration that,

Its descriptions have relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality.

The report-writers’ own analysis reveals, by contrast, the existence of:

relatively few groups, less divided between nationalists and foreign jihadis than assumed, whose strategy and tactics have evolved (in response to U.S. actions and to maximise acceptance by Sunni Arabs), and whose confidence in defeating the occupation is rising. An anti-insurgency approach primarily focused on reducing the insurgents’ perceived legitimacy – rather than achieving their military destruction, decapitation and dislocation – is far more likely to succeed.

On pp.1-2, the report lists the four main groups as:

* Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (al-Qaeda’s Organisation in Mesopotamia),
* Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna (Partisans of the Sunna Army),
* Al-Jaysh al-Islami fil-’Iraq (the Islamic Army in Iraq), and
* Al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Muqawama al-’Iraqiya (the Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance), known by its initials as Jami’ (mosque or gathering).

I don’t have a lot of time to summarize this important and extremely heavily footnoted report. (Reading the footnotes themselves provides a rich education in what’s been going on in Iraq.) But I’ll do the best that I can.
The report describes three main periods– until now– in the tenor of these groups’ communications:

* Phase 1, which apparently ended in mid-2004, they characterize as “Competitition”;
* Phase 2, mid-1004 through mid-2005, was “Consolidation”; and
* Phase 3, mid-2005 through the present, is “Confidence”.

Let me paste in what they say about the “Confidence” period (pp.13-14):

Continue reading “The Iraqi insurgency, analyzed”

So where are they now, all those pundits and experts in Iraqi affairs who’ve been telling us non-stop since the December elections that SCIRI’s Abdel-Aziz Hakim is “the most powerful politician in Iraq”?
Ever since December 20, I’ve been saying— hey, wait a minute! It certainly looks true that the UIA did very well in the election– but don’t just assume that Hakim and SCIRI are the strongest force inside the UIA!
That day, and on Dec. 22, and Dec. 27, and many times since then I’ve been saying the same thing, and pointing to the very important tussle that’s been going on inside the UIA.
Very early on there, the Norwegian researcher Reidar Visser started coming in with some solid data indicating that– as I had judged might well be the case– Moqtada Sadr and his people was much stronger inside the UIA than the western pundits’ “consensus” seemed to think, and SCIRI/Hakim correspondingly weaker.
Just until a couple of days ago, western media people in Baghdad were still routinely describing Hakim as “the most powerful pol in Iraq.”
But he got upstaged and out-maneuvered, didn’t he? The UIA swung behind outgoing Premier Ibrahim Jaafari, instead. Jaafari’s Daawa Party (both branches) only got 26 of the UIA’s 128 seats in the parliament– fewer than SCIRI’s 29. But the two branches of Sadrists got 45 seats, and Sadr swung behind Jaafari, most likely in an effort to block SCIRI.
Visser did a pretty good job in this Jan. 20 post of describing the differences in political approach between SCIRI and the Sadrists. One main one has to do with federalism: SCIRI and Hakim have expressed themselves strongly in favor of a radical decentralization/dissolution of the Iraqi state, whereas the Sadrists– including in the south of Iraq– are much more in favor of keeping the unitary state.
How did so much of the US MSM– and even, on some occasions, Juan Cole– manage to get it so wrong about Hakim being (or not being) the “most powerful politician in Iraq”? In that same post, too, Visser refers to SCIRI’s “slick and professional” leadership style…
Well, Jaafari and the Sadrists winning this one is only the first step toward forming a sovereign, independent government in Iraq, which surely should be the goal of all concerned. The parliament is now due to convene within the next two weeks. It will elect a President, and then a prime Minister. There are many, many hurdles still to cross. But wouldn’t it be great if Sadr and his allies were truly able to reach out to form a ruling coalition made of people who are, as he seems to me to be, strong and politically effective Iraqi nationalists?

Reidar Visser, who must be the western world’s leading UIA-ologist, has come out with his latest analysis on the seats won in Iraq’s new 275-member parliament by the United Iraqi Alliance, which is the large, catch-all electoral “list” fielded in the December elections by a coalition of Shiite parties.
The main development there since Visser produced his last piece of UIA-ology on January 20, is the distribution within the UIA of the 19 “compensatory” or “national” seats that the list was awarded. Visser had warned back in january that the distribution of these seats would be hard fought over among the parties within the list… and indeed that seems to have been the case. But the upshot was that SCIRI/Badr seems to have competed the most successfully in that internecine, intra-party contest– and came out with 9 of those 19 seats despite having earlier won only 19% of the more fairly allocated “governorate-level” seats.
Of the 19 national seats, Visser writes that the pro-Moqtada Sadrist bloc was awarded 3, the Fadila Sadrist bloc 2, Daawa (Iraq)– one, and 4 went to independents.
Visser’s analysis of the final allocation of the UIA’s 128 total seats is therefore as follows:

SCIRI/Badr: 23%– 29 seats
pro-Moqtada Sadrists: 22% — 28 seats
Fadila Sadrists: 13% — 17 seats
Daawa: 10% — 13 seats
Daawa (Iraq): 10% — 13 seats
Independents: 22% — 28 seats

His political-analysis bottom line is this:

Even after this impressive catch of [“national”] seats by SCIRI, the internal UIA structure remains multiplex and without any obvious point of gravity. Recent political developments only serve to emphasise this. Complaints about the internal distribution of “national” seats have been loud, with some threatening to leave the coalition. The ongoing contest over the Alliance’s candidate for prime minister has also taken a lot longer than UIA leaders had envisaged; some of the smaller parties such as Hizb al-Fadila have even fielded candidates of their own. And Sadrists have continued protesting against federalism, claiming that the issue should at least be postponed until all foreign forces have left Iraq. The Sadrist subtext seems to be that the whole course of Iraqi politics today is influenced by the presence of foreign troops (and their influential diplomats, who are in the habit of paying frequent visits to a highly select pick of Iraqi politicians), and that normal conditions will only come once the external factor diminishes in importance. That point may conceivably even be aimed at the internal politics of the United Iraqi Alliance, where SCIRI is far ahead of everyone else in expertly cultivating bilateral ties with foreign powers.

Well, as I noted here on Tuesday, Moqtada’s also been making a series of “premier-in-waiting” type calls on foreign powers– namely, on Iraqi neighbors Iran, Syria, and next up Saudi Arabia.
And today, AP reported that the meeting of UIA pols this afternoon that had previously been “spun” (by the SCIRI types) as the gathering that would generate the name for the UIA’s candidate for PM, resulted instead in yet another deadlock.
That AP piece, by Qassi Abu-Zahra, reported that,

the vote was postponed for at least a day at the request of the faction loyal to the anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr because of differences with another group, according to Shiites who attended the meeting.
Shiite officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said the al-Sadr faction was leaning toward Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Another Shiite group had doubts about al-Jaafari, and al-Sadr’s lieutenants wanted time to confer, the officials said.
The disagreement could strengthen the position of the other major candidate — Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a French-educated former finance minister backed by the country’s top Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq.
The choice of the umbrella Shiite alliance is assured of becoming prime minister because Shiites won the most parliament seats in national elections. The alliance, however, is a collection of Shiite parties and factions with individual agendas, not a cohesive organization.
The winning candidate will need a simple majority of the 128 parliamentarians.

I haven’t had time to get into the Arabic-language press on these late-breaking developments. Anyone who has, please post a link and a summary in the comments.
My DDI counter here tells me, meanwhile, that it’s been an amazing 58 days since the Iraqi election, and they still don’t have a government accountable to the elected parliament. Could it be– shock! horror! (irony alert)– that there has been political interference from foreign powers that has sought to sway the outcome??
But Reidar, thanks again for your great work on this. Am I missing something, or does a lot now hang on the choices made by that large number of “Independents”?

Well, we still don’t have a government in Iraq though my handy DDI counter on the sidebar here at JWN tells me that it’s been 54 days since the Iraqi election.
Much of the MSM here in the US has stopped its previous, breathless following of “who’s up” and “who’s down” in the contest for the various government posts… Moreover, we’ve had many fewer mentions recently of SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim as being “the most powerful man in Iraq”, etc, etc. A tag, I should note, that I questioned from the get-go— and then Reidar Visser provided some solid facts about the intra-UIA balance that backed up my questioning.
And today, we have this from AP’s Paul Garwood:

Behind most of Iraq’s protests over cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad has been one increasingly important figure — the fiercely anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Al-Sadr, whose militia has fought U.S. troops and rival Shiite groups for prestige and power since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, has been meeting Middle East heads of state, including Iranian leaders and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
His political supporters won 30 seats in Iraq’s 275-member parliament, giving al-Sadr considerable clout in the dominant Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance.
“That’s not bad for a man people once regarded as inexperienced and ineffectual,” Iraqi analyst Mustafa al-Ani said from the United Arab Emirates.
He also said the cleric posed a strong challenge to the Shiite old guard, including Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq’s largest Shiite political party, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. “He is going to compete with them for the Shiite leadership,” al-Ani said. [Duh! ~HC]
Al-Sadr, in his early 30s, offers an alternative to Iraqis furious at the government’s inability to restore security and basic services and to those opposed to the presence of U.S.-led troops.

And guess what, among those troops are troops from Anders Rasmussen’s little Denmark.
Garwood continues:

In a sign of his popularity, particularly among younger Shiites, al-Sadr has drawn thousands of supporters onto the streets to denounce Denmark, where the drawings of the Muslim prophet were first published, and other countries where newspapers reprinted the images.
Some 5,000 protesters rallied outside a government building Monday in the southern city of Kut, burning Danish flags and calling for the 530-member Danish military contingent to be booted out of Iraq. The demonstration came a day after a gunman shot at Danish soldiers, children hurled stones at another patrol and a homemade bomb was defused near their base in Qurnah, 300 miles southeast of Baghdad.
“All these things add up to the idea that we might not be as popular as we have been as a result of the Prophet Muhammad drawings,” said Capt. Filip Ulrichsen of the Danish contingent. [Duh! ~HC]
The caricatures also prompted Transport Minister Salam al-Maliki, an al-Sadr follower, to freeze contracts between his department and Danish companies operating in Iraq.

Garwood goes on to quote some other Iraqi analysts as saying Moqtada seems to be doing pretty well politically. He writes, “Whether al-Sadr poses a threat to the Shiite political establishment remains to be seen, but many note he is maturing into a formidable political leader with street credibility for standing up to foreign forces.”
Sadr has been making a “premier-in-waiting” type of tour to neighboring countries, most recently Syria. Garwood again:

In Damascus, al-Sadr told reporters on Monday that Iraqi and Syrian relations remain strong and that the common enemies were the United States, Israel and Britain, who were bent on “sowing seeds of sedition” between the neighboring Arab states.
He also sent a message to the Americans that Iran and Syria — accused by the U.S. of sponsoring regional militants — were his friends, adding “I will be one of the defenders of Syria and Iran, and all Islamic states.”

Like invading colonial powers throughout history, the US and its allies have been intent on pursuing “divide and rule” policies both within Iraq and throughout the region. Sadr has stood up quite clearly against these attempts. Though a number of his past actions– and those of some of his more zealous supporters– are certainly questionable (to say the least), at this point he may well be the best person to prevent the spiralling downward of Iraq into civil war, given his insistence on strengthening Shii-Sunni links inside the country.
I hope to heck he has some very savvy bodyguards.