Rearranging the deck chairs of Iraq’s government
Cracks finally appear to be forming in the perpetual-immobility machine that has been Iraq’s post-election political process since last spring’s nationwide elections.
This morning, Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press reported:
The Sunni-backed political coalition that narrowly won the most votes in Iraq’s parliamentary election appeared Sunday to be giving up its demand for the premiership, boosting the Shiite prime minister’s drive to keep his job.
. . . “We have reached a position that we don’t care anymore about posts,” said Sheik Adnan al-Danbous, a Shiite who is close to Iraqiya chief Ayad Allawi. “Posts are not as important to us as having participation in decision-making.”
. . . “We don’t mind if al-Maliki is the prime minister, but we have to have a decision-making post,” al-Danbous told The Associated Press.
What Abdul-Zahra refers to as a “stunning turnabout” from Iraqiya’s months-long refusal to have anything to do with a Maliki-led government signifies that Allawi is beginning to accept that he’ll be Iraq’s Al Gore, as I dubbed him when his slate won a narrow plurality in the spring elections.
It’s no coincidence that this shift happened just days after Moqtada as-Sadr’s similar about-face caused his faction to back current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (joined by some smaller allied Shiite parties). By bringing him within one more key bloc of having a parliamentary majority, the Sadrist endorsement gave Maliki the leverage needed to tell Iraqiya to get on board or miss the train of government power — and the resulting patronage opportunies — completely.
Not that Iraqiya is likely to get the “decision-making post” the Allawi aide mentions as a fallback demand. In an interview on Friday, Maliki told the Jane Arraf of the Christian Science Monitor that he was offering to create a new National Council for Strategic Studies as part of the cabinet, and put Allawi in charge of it. But this gambit has been tried before, and failed. Although his regime has accomplished little else, Maliki has shown expertise in finding or creating loopholes in any rules designed to limit his power… in fact, that is why the prime minister has had such a hard time finding any allies since March.
So why did Sadr, who at one point seemed to be the political figure most opposed to Maliki’s re-nomination, become the first major leader to officially endorse it? The conventional wisdom has credited the turnabout to pressure from Iran, but I think that view is too shallow. What Iran wanted was to keep a coalition led by Iraq’s Shiite religious parties in power, and that was always inevitable — the main reason the stalemate over creating a government has dragged out so long is that despites the Sadrists’ fervently voiced objections to Maliki staying in power, they really had nowhere else to go. It was just a matter of what price they would demand for coming on board.
That price, according to various reports (which, despite a denial in the CSM interview from Maliki, are likely accurate), is that Sadr’s supporters will run substantially more influential ministries than they did the last time they were in the government… including a key role in the army/police forces. This added power will come at the expense not of Maliki, but of the Sadrists’ erstwhile allies in the short-lived Iraqi National Alliance, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), who named a would-be prime minister (Adel Abdel-Mahdi) with support from the Sadr bloc just a month ago.
With that tentative backing in hand, Abdel-Mahdi and ISCI went hat in hand to Allawi and the Kurdish parties looking for further support in deposing Maliki — only to have the Sadrists go back to the prime minister and cut a deal that threw ISCI under the bus, leaving their powerful ministries (ISCI had been in charge of the army, police, and finance ministries since the 2005 elections) up for grabs.
It’s not really that surprising when you understand that ISCI and the Sadrists have had a feud that dates to before the U.S. invasion and has erupted into violence on several occasions since 2003, usually in regard to ISCI’s control of key Muslim shrines in Najaf and Karbala. In fact, Maliki came to power as an unknown in 2006 due to Moqtada’s determination to keep the prime minister’s job from going to… Adel Abdel-Mahdi of ISCI. That history appears to be repeating itself now, even if it was preceded by a thoroughly convincing head fake on Moqtada’s part. (Cue Scott Joplin piano music.)
Of course, you’ll note that in these tales of political maneuvering, there’s precious little to be said about actual government policies, much less the benefits to ordinary Iraqis that should be the goal of such policies. As with politics in so many other countries, that seems to be an irrelevant concern to the supposed leaders of Iraq.