Needlenose

The street protests have finally spread to Iraq.  Surprising only because it took so long – I would think the Iraqi people are suffering more than anybody in the Arabic world nowadays, along anyway in which you wish to measure quality of life. During the early days of the Shrubya occupation, co-blogger Swopa was fond of discussing the role of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s role as the behind the scenes ‘power broker,’ who could always pull the card of a popular uprising to stop the worst overreaches of Shrubya’s various Mayberry Machinations.

I had once mused that a real popular uprising could upstage Sistani and really bring about an end to the occupation (a concept that Swopa laughingly disparaged).  Well it seems like Sistani is in fact trying to get in front of the popular uprising train, except that it has already left the station.  Hard to say though if this is in fact the beginning of the end for Maliki, or whether this is just another bloody miserable episode in the string of misery that has become the lot of Iraq since the Repugs decided to trash the place and seize the oil

(NOTE: This is a re-written version of the post below, updated to reflect a NY Times story that appeared online after I posted it.  It originally appeared at Firedoglake.)

You’d think the American government would be happy that Iraq’s post-election political process — which has been a perpetual-immobility machine since last spring’s parliamentary elections — is finally starting to inch forward.

But you would be wrong.  In a story from Sunday with the bland headline of “U.S. Presses Iraqi Leaders to Broaden Coalition” (yeah, what else is new?), the New York Times buries this detail after the lead paragraph:

The administration has sought and received assurances that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will not offer the followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr positions in charge of Iraq’s security forces in exchange for supporting Mr. Maliki’s bid for a second term in office, according to officials familiar with negotiations now under way.

. . . The Sadrists’ surprising support of Mr. Maliki, only weeks after opposing his nomination, raised alarms in Washington and gave new urgency to the efforts to persuade Mr. Maliki to include the country’s other main factions in a new government.

The article goes on to quote U.S ambassador James Jeffrey as saying the Obama administration wants “clarity on whether the Sadrist movement is a political movement or it is an armed militia which carries out political objectives through violent means.” In fact, though, the Sadrists could soon be both.

Reports to this effect have been cropping up in the fine print of news stories for a few days now.  Last week, the Associated Press reported:

A leading member of al-Sadr’s movement said their demands include as many as six of the 34 Cabinet-level ministry posts, possibly the trade ministry and one post linked to security operations.

Meanwhile, Sam Dagher wrote for the Wall Street Journal:

A senior leader in Mr. Maliki’s party said Mr. Sadr’s movement had demanded key ministries [and] a 25% quota of all government jobs, including in the army and police.

Whatever “assurances” the Obama administration has received that these deals won’t come to fruition are likely to be illusory.  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.

And here lies the real explanation of why 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 him.  The conventional wisdom credited the turnabout to pressure from Iran, but the truth has more to do with cold-blooded horse-trading within Iraq.

Any added power the Sadr faction gains over its previous participation in the government 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.

Having followed Iraqi politics for a while, that was the announcement that surprised me.  You see, 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.  Because, with Sadr’s supposedly secured backing, Abdel-Mahdi and ISCI went hat in hand to other major factions (Iyad 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.

Those ministries, and the power they represent, appear to be what Sadr was angling after all along.  I’d say, “cue the Scott Joplin piano music,” if it weren’t for the grim implications of what a Sadr-influenced army and police force might have in store for the Iraqi people.

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.

“You win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category…”
– Al Gore, on the 2000 U.S. presidential election

A couple of days ago, while awaiting the final results from Iraq’s parliamentary elections, Marc Lynch (a/k/a Abu Aardvark) wrote that the country “faces a double-edged test”:

If al-Maliki triumphs in a narrow election and assembles a coalition that largely reproduces the outgoing government, many Iraqis may feel that the election was a sham, and that democracy is not capable of producing true change. If al-Maliki loses, he may not surrender power without a fight…

Or, you know, both could happen.  From the New York Times this morning:

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s party lost the Iraqi election, but a day after the results were announced it became clear that he would fight to hold on to his post — even before the outcome was declared.

On Thursday, a day before the results were announced, he quietly persuaded the Iraqi supreme court to issue a ruling that potentially allows him to choose the new government instead of awarding that right to the winner of the election, the former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi.

On another front, officials in charge of purging the government of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party said Saturday that they still expected to disqualify 50 political candidates, many of them members of Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya Party. That could strip Mr. Allawi of his narrow plurality, 91 parliamentary seats compared with 89 for Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party.

And if all that does not work, the prime minister still is clamoring for a recount. . . . Ultimately, the same Supreme Federal Court, which is nominally independent but has proved friendly to Mr. Maliki in the past, will decide the recount issue.

Yes, it’s always nice to have a friendly Supreme Court in your back pocket in case of a close election, isn’t it?

The relevance of the court’s decision is that under the Iraqi constitution, the electoral coalition with the largest number of seats in parliament gets the first chance to form a government, including choosing a prime minister.  But because although Allawi’s slate came in first in the voting, the court ruled that a coalition formed after the election would be eligible — meaning that Maliki’s party and the bloc of Shiite religious parties (who came in second and third, respectively) could unite and thereby “win” the right to stay in power.

As a result, a coalition like the one I predicted two weeks ago is still the most likely outcome: Maliki’s “State of Law” bloc (unfortunate acronym and all), his off-and-on Shiite allies (including those loyal to U.S. bogeyman-cleric Moqtada as-Sadr), and the largest Kurdish parties, creating a near-reunion of the 2005 government.

Why?  Because despite ordinary Iraqis’ unhappiness with the incumbent regime’s corruption and ineptitude, the high-level fault lines that brought about the Shiite-Kurdish alliance — in particular, the desire to remove any trace of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath party from the government and especially the military — still exist.

In 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani oversaw the creation of a nearly all-Shiite electoral slate in order to ensure that Iraq’s majority sect would control the country’s post-Saddam future.  Even if just enough voters in Iraq’s predominantly Shiite regions rejected that sectarian strategy (either by staying home or defecting to Allawi’s coalition) to tip this month’s election results, Sistani is not likely to accept such a swift unraveling of his master plan — and his will is unlikely to be defied by the politicians he brought to power, especially for the sake of a minority role in an Allawi-led regime.

Similarly, as Juan Cole notes this morning, an alliance between Allawi and the Kurdish factions is implausible because of the battles for influence between Kurds and the Sunni Arabs who make up Allawi’s political base in Kirkuk and other parts of northern Iraq.  As Cole concludes, “Allawi may therefore have a plurality that is incapable of growing into a majority.”

The primary impact of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s surprising (if narrow) second-place finish, if anything, is likely to be felt by Maliki himself.  Even if Team Shiite reunites as I’ve been predicting, Maliki’s rivals in the religious parties may demand his scalp as the price for patching up the assorted feuds of the last four years.  But that would put all of the factions in the troublesome position of having to agree on a successor, meaning even more wrangling before a government can be formed.

But then, given the congested and inconclusive results of the election, I suppose that would be fitting.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

So the election results are trickling in slowly from the Iraqi parliamentary elections, and the coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expressing confidence that they will come away with the largest share of the votes — a confidence that may or may not be related to the gradually accumulating accusations of fraud in the ballot-counting process.

Although all of the blocs that made up the Iraqi national legislature have frayed somewhat since the last round of elections at the end of 2005, virtually all of the major players are expected to return when the dust settles this time… most likely including al-Maliki as the prime minister.

As happened four years ago, you can expect the major Shiite religious parties to join forces with the dominant Kurdish groups to form a ruling coalition, shutting out all but a few token Sunnis as well as secular Shiite politicians like the former U.S.-installed interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.  Although there was a much-ballyhooed split between Maliki and the other religious factions last summer, several savvy observers noted right away that a reunion was inevitable.

I wrote at the time that the strategy behind the frenemies-style breakup seemed to be to diffuse the public unhappiness with the Shiite-dominated government’s lack of results in delivering basic services:

… Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate [again], while the Hakim-Sadr-et al. group could pose as running against the Maliki regime… even though (surprise!) everyone would wind up in effect reelecting Team Shiite, with Maliki on top.

For better or worse, judging from the early voting returns and the political jockeying that has already begun, this analysis from last August seems to have been on target.

The difference this time is something that may not bear fruit until the next parliamentary elections, whenever those might be.  By apparently unifying behind Allawi’s slate, the fragmented losers from the 2005 elections — Sunnis of all stripes, as well as secular Shiites — will in effect make him the clear, singular leader of the political opposition.

Given the rampant corruption and ineptitude of the current (and likely to be re-installed) Iraqi government, that could be a favorable spot to hold.  If the next few years aren’t much of an improvement over the last four, and voters choose not to be fooled again by a faux split among the religious Shiite parties, Allawi would be uniquely positioned to ride the wave of political resentment.   (What would happen then is something even I can’t begin to guess.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

President Obama and Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki at the White House yesterday (via the Associated Press).

Kim Gamel and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press report from Baghdad today:

The Iranian-backed Shiite parties that helped propel Iraq’s prime minister into power three years ago dumped him Monday as their candidate for re-election, forming a new alliance to contest the January vote.

The move dealt a blow to Nouri al-Maliki’s chances to keep his job next year and set the stage for a showdown between competing factions in the Shiite coalition that had dominated Iraq’s government since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

. . . The Shiite prime minister’s efforts to win public confidence by portraying himself as a champion of security have taken a battering in recent weeks. A wave of horrific bombings has called into question the government’s ability to protect the Iraqi people two months after most U.S. forces pulled out of urban areas.

. . . Monday’s political announcement — made with fanfare at a news conference — represents a major realignment.

The new bloc, called the Iraqi National Alliance, will include the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, or SIIC, and [Moqtada] al-Sadr’s bloc . . .

. . . [Maliki] stayed out of the new alliance because leaders refused to guarantee him the prime minister’s spot, officials said. Rumored possibilities for the job include new alliance members ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, current Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and even Former Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite.

(*A brief pause here, to allow readers to shudder*)

The realignment does not immediately threaten al-Maliki’s position as prime minister, but points to stormy politics in the election campaign and beyond, as U.S. troops begin scaling back their presence.

Supreme Council lawmaker Reda Jawad Taqi said a last-ditch meeting was held Sunday to try to bring al-Maliki into the fold but it failed to overcome the differences.

Then again, with at least five months to go before the elections, nothing can be considered final:

One of al-Maliki’s advisers, Hassan al-Sineid, said in a televised response that the prime minister and the leaders of the new alliance differed over “the mechanism of participation in the alliance and the need to open this alliance to include a broad range of political powers.”

In other words, the assorted hucksters couldn’t agree on the latest division of the loot (i.e., the respective number of seats in the Iraqi parliament and allotted Cabinet posts, and the opportunities for graft that go with them).

The prime minister instead is working to form an alternate coalition. He is reaching out to a prominent Sunni sheik in Anbar province, whose followers include fighters who joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaida in Iraq.

. . . Despite Monday’s announcement, the new Shiite alliance was careful to leave the door open for the Dawa Party to join later.

Abdul-Mahdi, a top SIIC member, was among those reaching out to Dawa, saying it was important to present a strong united front that can address the overwhelming challenges facing the country.

Bet on Grand Ayatollah/cat-herder-in-chief Ali Sistani to get involved, either personally or through proxies in Iran, to referee the dispute.  By the time the election rolls around, the team is likely to be back together again.

Update: Both Juan Cole and Joel Wing at Musings on Iraq cite claims/rumors endorsing my hunch that the sticking point is how many seats Maliki’s party would be allotted as part of the allied election slate. (Separately, there’s a detailed breakdown of the factions involved from Reidar Visser.)

Prof. Cole raises a point I nearly suggested in my original post — Maliki might run on a different slate from the rest of Team Shiite, then agree to form a governing coalition after the election. The possibly too-clever thinking at work in this scenario could be that Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate, while the Hakim-Sadr-et al. group could pose as running against the Maliki regime… even though (surprise!) everyone would wind up in effect reelecting Team Shiite, with Maliki on top.

The Washington Post reports today:

The Iraqi government announced Monday that it intends to let voters decide in January whether the departure of U.S. troops should be accelerated.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet is submitting a draft law to parliament asking it to authorize and fund a referendum on the bilateral agreement that regulates the presence of U.S. troops, the government announced.

The referendum would be held during January’s national election.

U.S. officials have quietly lobbied the Iraqi government to suspend plans to hold the referendum, because they’re all but certain voters would annul the agreement.

If that were to happen, U.S. troops would have one year to depart, moving up their targeted December 2011 withdrawal date by almost a year.

. . . When the security agreement was negotiated last year, some lawmakers demanded that its implementation on Jan. 1 be followed by a referendum. The referendum was supposed to happen in July, but the government took no action, leading American officials to believe it would never happen.

Note that if the Iraqi government really wanted a referendum and a faster U.S. withdrawal, they could have held the vote last month as promised.

Postponing it until January (or whenever the national elections are eventually held) suggests that the main concern is keeping the American occupation alive as a political issue — and thereby distracting attention from the Iraqi government’s ongoing inability to deliver basic services like electricity.  It seems Maliki & Co. don’t want to go into that election with their own performance as the primary issue.

What’s important about the memo, revealed yesterday, from an army colonel advising American forces in Iraq that recommends an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country?

It wasn’t an expression of official policy, just one colonel’s advice — and we quickly learned the author, Col. Timothy Reese, was something of a loose cannon in terms of his opinions.

Even so, after years of neocon hype of inevitable “victory,” and as recently as three months ago (even after announcing a withdrawal timeline), President Obama still pretending that there was a mission to be accomplished, Col. Reese has formally placed on the table for discussion within the Pentagon an obvious truth regarding the U.S. in Iraq: “The use of the military instrument of national power in its current form has accomplished all that can be expected.“

It’s about time that top U.S. military officials started facing that fact. For five years now, I’ve been writing about the ability of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Shiite-dominated government he shepherded into power to resist American pressure — and been right nearly every time I bet on that ability to prevail.

A year ago, when the conventional wisdom was that Iraqi prime minister Maliki’s demands for a withdrawal timeline (during negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA) were just to placate Iraqi public opinion while coming up with a way for the U.S. to stay, I wrote that Sistani’s plan since 2004 was “to use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.”

Maliki’s successful insistence on a timeline, and the unexpected restrictions that Col. Reese’s memo says are now being placed on U.S. troops in the wake of the SOFA being implemented, represent that plan in action. And contrary to what many progressives would rightly hope, it’s not an expression of sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people. It’s Robert Shaw being hustled out of the building at the end of “The Sting.”

Sure, prime minister Maliki may make noise about extending the U.S. presence — but make no mistake, any new agreement will be on the Iraqi government’s terms, which will have far less to do with building a functional, thriving democracy than with continuing to use American military might to crush Maliki’s political enemies.

The Iraq war was a “victory” not for the United States, nor for the Iraqi people, but rather for a corrupt and authoritarian-leaning regime whose most redeeming characteristic is that it isn’t quite as brutal and dictatorial (yet, anyway) as Saddam Hussein’s — which, sadly, was the obviously probable end result all along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

From Reuters a couple of days ago (via Salam Pax):

Before leaving Washington last week to deliver a major foreign policy speech in Germany, [Vice President Joseph] Biden chided Baghdad for failing to settle disputes over the city of Kirkuk and to enact a law dividing oil revenue, among other issues.

“I think our administration is going to have to be very deeply involved. We are going to have to get in there and be much more aggressive in forcing them to deal with these issues,” Biden said.

Asked about Biden’s remarks on Tuesday, [Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-]Maliki, an increasingly assertive leader whose followers won surprise victories in provincial elections last month, fired back.

“I believe talk about applying pressure on the Iraqi government or taking hard measures against it no longer works,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The New York Times version is even more blunt:

“The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over,” Mr. Maliki said in answer to a reporter’s question about Mr. Biden’s remarks. “The Iraqi government knows what its responsibilities are.” [. . .]

According to political advisers, Mr. Maliki is intent on changing the nature of Baghdad’s relationship with Washington, shifting Iraq’s role from a client state to a more equal partner.

This is a point I kept trying to make last year, when I wrote that Maliki & Co. had every reason to sincerely push for U.S. concessions in the SOFA negotiations – including endorsing Obama’s proposed withdrawal timeline.   Rather than begging for a neocon occupation to prop them up, I wrote last July, the Shiite clerical powers who put Maliki and his allies in office wanted to

… use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.  Maliki’s newfound spine, if anything, just means that they think that time is drawing closer.

And it’s drawing closer still now.  Anyone on the U.S. side who imagines we’re still in a position to impose our will on Iraq, whether it’s Biden, Obama, or Gen. Petraeus and his cronies, is likely to spend the coming months finding out how irrelevant their plans are.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)