Tweet
Iraq Winners Allied with Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision
Iraq Winners Allied with Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision
By Robin Wright
The Washington Post
Monday 14 February 2005
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."
Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.
Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.
And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.
"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."
Added Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of Beirut's Daily Star: "The idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions about what would happen have proven false."
The results have long-term implications. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations played Baghdad and Tehran off each other to ensure neither became a regional giant threatening or dominant over U.S. allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms.
But now, Cole said, Iraq and Iran are likely to take similar positions on many issues, from oil prices to U.S. policy on Iran. "If the United States had decided three years ago to bomb Iran, it would have produced joy in Baghdad," he added. "Now it might produce strong protests from Baghdad."
Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed most strongly by the Bush administration lost big. During his State of the Union address last year, Bush invited Adnan Pachachi, a longtime Sunni politician and then-president of the Iraqi Governing Council, to sit with first lady Laura Bush. Pachachi's party fared so poorly in the election that it won no seats in the national assembly.
And current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, backed by the CIA during his years in exile and handpicked by U.S. and U.N. officials to lead the interim government, came in third. He addressed a joint session of Congress in September, a rare honor reserved for heads of state of the closest U.S. allies. But now, U.S. hopes that Allawi will tally enough votes to vie as a compromise candidate and continue his leadership are unrealistic, analysts say.
"The big losers in this election are the liberals," said Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation government. "The fact that three-quarters of the national assembly seats have gone to just two [out of 111] slates is a worrisome trend. Unless the ruling coalition reaches out to broaden itself to include all groups, the insurgency will continue -- and may gain ground."
Adel Abdul Mahdi, who is a leading contender to be prime minister, reiterated yesterday that the new government does not want to emulate Iran. "We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." "Now we are working for a democratic government. This is our choice."
And a senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 percent vote won by the Shiite slate deprives it of an outright majority. "If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation," he said on the condition of anonymity because of department rules.
U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate. Iraq's Arabs and Iran's Persians have a long and rocky history. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Shiite troops did not defect to Iran.
"There's the assumption that the new government will be close to Iran or influenced by Iran. That's a strong and reasonable assumption," Khouri said. "But I don't think anyone knows -- including Grand Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani -- where the fault line is between Shiite religious identity and Iraqi national identity."
Iranian-born Sistani is now Iraq's top cleric -- and the leader who pressed for elections when Washington favored a caucus system to pick a government. His aides have also rejected Iran's theocracy as a model, although the Shiite slate is expected to press for Islamic law to be incorporated in the new constitution.
For now, the United States appears prepared to accept the results -- in large part because it has no choice.
But the results were announced at a time when the United States faces mounting tensions with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, support for extremism and human rights violations. On her first trip abroad this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran's behavior was "something to be loathed" and charged that the "unelected mullahs" are not good for Iran or the region.
One of the biggest questions, analysts say, is whether Iraq's democratic election will make it easier -- or harder -- to pressure Iran.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Iraqi Vote Gives Shia Parties a Mandate for Islamic Law
By David Enders and Daniel Howden
The Independent U.K.
Monday 14 February 2005
A coalition of Shia religious parties has won the Iraq election, taking almost half the votes and raising the spectre of Islamic law finding its way into the country's new constitution.
The United Iraqi Alliance, also known as the Shia House, took 48 per cent of the vote, winning 130 seats in the new 275-member national assembly, according to provisional results of the 30 January poll.
The alliance of Kurdish parties came second on 26 per cent, with the party of the US-appointed interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, finishing a distant third, with less than 14 per cent.
A two-thirds majority is needed for complete control of the assembly in a system devised to ensure that none of Iraq's three biggest communities - the Shias, Sunnis or Kurds - can rule without the others' co-operation.
Before the voting, members of the Shia list had been careful to assure worried Iraqis that clerics would not be given positions in the new government.
But members of the Shia coalition, emboldened by strong early returns, have already called for sharia, or Islamic law, to be applied in civil matters. This, among other things, could allow Iraqi men to have four wives at once, and limit women's inheritance to half that of men.
"Eighty per cent of Iraqis don't have a problem with Islamic law," said Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Finance Minister in the interim government and one of the Shia coalition's nominees for prime minister.
The coalition is built around two Shia parties with close links to Iran - Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). They have the backing of the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shia cleric.
The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, congratulated members of the new national assembly yesterday. Mr Straw said: "It is crucial for the future of Iraq that the full diversity of Iraqi society is represented in the political and constitutional process. Prime Minister Allawi and many other key Iraqi political figures continue to emphasise this point."
The election results will not become official for three days to allow for procedural challenges. The Shia coalition, which had been projecting that it would take 60 per cent of the vote, said it was meeting yesterday to discuss whether to challenge the numbers. "They will discuss it with the [electoral] commission," said Jenan al-Obeidi, a candidate for SCIRI. "We think the votes are more than that."
Ms Obeidi, who has not supported bringing clerics into the new government, said having less than 50 per cent of the seats would not be a setback, even though the Kurds, who have already voiced their opposition to sharia, make up the second-largest bloc.
"The Kurds won't be able to challenge us. They will have to discuss it with us," she said. Ms Obeidi also raised the possibility of pushing for a more federal state, in which different aspects of sharia would be adopted locally.
Faraj Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said the Kurdish parties would not accept sharia. "We are going to have civil law no matter what. If other cities want to have their own systems, let them do it," he said.
Mr Haidari struck a more conciliatory note than Ms Obeidi, saying that his members would reach out to all parties, and especially the disenfranchised Sunni minority.
It is believed that the prime minister will be a Shia, the president a Kurd and the speaker of the national assembly, a position of relatively little power, a Sunni.
US officials have begun exploratory talks with politicians from the winning coalition to try to gauge their relationship with Iran, a predominantly Shia nation. US diplomats have bluntly asked the leaders how a Shia-dominated government would react if Iran came under attack over its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Balance of Parties Means New Constitution Will Be a Product of Compromise
By Jonathan Steele
The Guardian U.K.
Monday February 14, 2005
Iraq has gained a relatively stable foundation for drawing up a new constitution after yesterday's election results.
The figures show that no group will be able to railroad its proposals through the drafting process. The watchwords will have to be dialogue and compromise.
The Shia list, known as the candle, which has emerged as the largest block, is made up largely of religious groups. But because it has fallen short of 50%, the forthcoming debate over whether secular or religious values will dominate in the constitution is wide open.
Even the definition of religious values is contested since the candle list also includes Christians.
By the same token the debate on federalism is also open.
Kurds did better from the election than their population numbers warrant, mainly because the Sunnis are under-represented.
With 25% of the seats in the national assembly, which will supervise the drafting of the constitution, the Kurds are in a powerful position to get their way in putting the "new Iraq" on a federal footing. This will protect their autonomy.
Any fears that the Shias would block the federal proposals are unrealistic now.
Many Shias from southern Iraq have as much of an interest in federalism as the Kurds, partly in order to have greater control in Basra over revenues from the southern Iraqi oilfields, which at the moment go to Baghdad.
The majority Shia view seems to be that the oil is a national resource, but if there was any sense that the northern oil fields were going to fall into Kurdish hands, they might wish to have the option of keeping exclusive control over the southern ones. A constitution which decentralised power to the provinces would keep that possibility alive.
The fact that relatively few seats have gone to the Sunnis poses a problem, though it was widely predicted. It was caused mainly by the election boycott called for by the Iraqi Islamic party and the Association of Muslim Scholars.
Since civilians in their region have felt the brunt of US military operations since the dictatorship fell, they made the argument that elections under occupation were unfair, and that the Americans were refusing to give even the vaguest timetable for the occupation's end.
This is what Washington calls a "conditions-based" rather than a "calendar-based" approach to the timing of withdrawal.
Shias and Kurds will have to work out a system by which Sunnis can be offered a reasonable stake in the constitution-drafting process.
Even before yesterday's announcement of the result, Iraq's leading politicians invited the Sunnis to take part. The Sunnis have not yet decided on their response.
The two main Sunni groupings are religious, but they appear to be less concerned about getting Islamic views on divorce and women's property and other rights reflected in a constitution than the Shia religious parties are. So they may not combine with the Shias in the drafting committees.
The first set of bargaining will centre on the choice of prime minister. The Americans have more than one candidate they could live with.
In spite of the election, the US retains a major behind-the-scenes role. But since the cabinet will be a coalition of different parties, the prime minister will not have the same power as Ayad Allawi, the current incumbent, who was essentially appointed by the US.
The turnout figure of 58%, announced yesterday, is high enough to give credibility to the new assembly, though it is much lower than hoped by those who hailed the poll two weeks ago as a triumph of freedom.
The election was flawed in many ways since it was hard for small parties to get their message across, and even the big parties did not have their programmes widely published.
Some voters took part because of the poll's significance as the first contested election in their lifetimes. Others had worries about jobs, power cuts, and security.
Now they have a government which will have to listen.
-------
By Robin Wright
The Washington Post
Monday 14 February 2005
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."
Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.
Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.
And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.
"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."
Added Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of Beirut's Daily Star: "The idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions about what would happen have proven false."
The results have long-term implications. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations played Baghdad and Tehran off each other to ensure neither became a regional giant threatening or dominant over U.S. allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms.
But now, Cole said, Iraq and Iran are likely to take similar positions on many issues, from oil prices to U.S. policy on Iran. "If the United States had decided three years ago to bomb Iran, it would have produced joy in Baghdad," he added. "Now it might produce strong protests from Baghdad."
Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed most strongly by the Bush administration lost big. During his State of the Union address last year, Bush invited Adnan Pachachi, a longtime Sunni politician and then-president of the Iraqi Governing Council, to sit with first lady Laura Bush. Pachachi's party fared so poorly in the election that it won no seats in the national assembly.
And current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, backed by the CIA during his years in exile and handpicked by U.S. and U.N. officials to lead the interim government, came in third. He addressed a joint session of Congress in September, a rare honor reserved for heads of state of the closest U.S. allies. But now, U.S. hopes that Allawi will tally enough votes to vie as a compromise candidate and continue his leadership are unrealistic, analysts say.
"The big losers in this election are the liberals," said Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation government. "The fact that three-quarters of the national assembly seats have gone to just two [out of 111] slates is a worrisome trend. Unless the ruling coalition reaches out to broaden itself to include all groups, the insurgency will continue -- and may gain ground."
Adel Abdul Mahdi, who is a leading contender to be prime minister, reiterated yesterday that the new government does not want to emulate Iran. "We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." "Now we are working for a democratic government. This is our choice."
And a senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 percent vote won by the Shiite slate deprives it of an outright majority. "If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation," he said on the condition of anonymity because of department rules.
U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate. Iraq's Arabs and Iran's Persians have a long and rocky history. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Shiite troops did not defect to Iran.
"There's the assumption that the new government will be close to Iran or influenced by Iran. That's a strong and reasonable assumption," Khouri said. "But I don't think anyone knows -- including Grand Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani -- where the fault line is between Shiite religious identity and Iraqi national identity."
Iranian-born Sistani is now Iraq's top cleric -- and the leader who pressed for elections when Washington favored a caucus system to pick a government. His aides have also rejected Iran's theocracy as a model, although the Shiite slate is expected to press for Islamic law to be incorporated in the new constitution.
For now, the United States appears prepared to accept the results -- in large part because it has no choice.
But the results were announced at a time when the United States faces mounting tensions with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, support for extremism and human rights violations. On her first trip abroad this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran's behavior was "something to be loathed" and charged that the "unelected mullahs" are not good for Iran or the region.
One of the biggest questions, analysts say, is whether Iraq's democratic election will make it easier -- or harder -- to pressure Iran.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Iraqi Vote Gives Shia Parties a Mandate for Islamic Law
By David Enders and Daniel Howden
The Independent U.K.
Monday 14 February 2005
A coalition of Shia religious parties has won the Iraq election, taking almost half the votes and raising the spectre of Islamic law finding its way into the country's new constitution.
The United Iraqi Alliance, also known as the Shia House, took 48 per cent of the vote, winning 130 seats in the new 275-member national assembly, according to provisional results of the 30 January poll.
The alliance of Kurdish parties came second on 26 per cent, with the party of the US-appointed interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, finishing a distant third, with less than 14 per cent.
A two-thirds majority is needed for complete control of the assembly in a system devised to ensure that none of Iraq's three biggest communities - the Shias, Sunnis or Kurds - can rule without the others' co-operation.
Before the voting, members of the Shia list had been careful to assure worried Iraqis that clerics would not be given positions in the new government.
But members of the Shia coalition, emboldened by strong early returns, have already called for sharia, or Islamic law, to be applied in civil matters. This, among other things, could allow Iraqi men to have four wives at once, and limit women's inheritance to half that of men.
"Eighty per cent of Iraqis don't have a problem with Islamic law," said Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Finance Minister in the interim government and one of the Shia coalition's nominees for prime minister.
The coalition is built around two Shia parties with close links to Iran - Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). They have the backing of the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shia cleric.
The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, congratulated members of the new national assembly yesterday. Mr Straw said: "It is crucial for the future of Iraq that the full diversity of Iraqi society is represented in the political and constitutional process. Prime Minister Allawi and many other key Iraqi political figures continue to emphasise this point."
The election results will not become official for three days to allow for procedural challenges. The Shia coalition, which had been projecting that it would take 60 per cent of the vote, said it was meeting yesterday to discuss whether to challenge the numbers. "They will discuss it with the [electoral] commission," said Jenan al-Obeidi, a candidate for SCIRI. "We think the votes are more than that."
Ms Obeidi, who has not supported bringing clerics into the new government, said having less than 50 per cent of the seats would not be a setback, even though the Kurds, who have already voiced their opposition to sharia, make up the second-largest bloc.
"The Kurds won't be able to challenge us. They will have to discuss it with us," she said. Ms Obeidi also raised the possibility of pushing for a more federal state, in which different aspects of sharia would be adopted locally.
Faraj Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said the Kurdish parties would not accept sharia. "We are going to have civil law no matter what. If other cities want to have their own systems, let them do it," he said.
Mr Haidari struck a more conciliatory note than Ms Obeidi, saying that his members would reach out to all parties, and especially the disenfranchised Sunni minority.
It is believed that the prime minister will be a Shia, the president a Kurd and the speaker of the national assembly, a position of relatively little power, a Sunni.
US officials have begun exploratory talks with politicians from the winning coalition to try to gauge their relationship with Iran, a predominantly Shia nation. US diplomats have bluntly asked the leaders how a Shia-dominated government would react if Iran came under attack over its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Balance of Parties Means New Constitution Will Be a Product of Compromise
By Jonathan Steele
The Guardian U.K.
Monday February 14, 2005
Iraq has gained a relatively stable foundation for drawing up a new constitution after yesterday's election results.
The figures show that no group will be able to railroad its proposals through the drafting process. The watchwords will have to be dialogue and compromise.
The Shia list, known as the candle, which has emerged as the largest block, is made up largely of religious groups. But because it has fallen short of 50%, the forthcoming debate over whether secular or religious values will dominate in the constitution is wide open.
Even the definition of religious values is contested since the candle list also includes Christians.
By the same token the debate on federalism is also open.
Kurds did better from the election than their population numbers warrant, mainly because the Sunnis are under-represented.
With 25% of the seats in the national assembly, which will supervise the drafting of the constitution, the Kurds are in a powerful position to get their way in putting the "new Iraq" on a federal footing. This will protect their autonomy.
Any fears that the Shias would block the federal proposals are unrealistic now.
Many Shias from southern Iraq have as much of an interest in federalism as the Kurds, partly in order to have greater control in Basra over revenues from the southern Iraqi oilfields, which at the moment go to Baghdad.
The majority Shia view seems to be that the oil is a national resource, but if there was any sense that the northern oil fields were going to fall into Kurdish hands, they might wish to have the option of keeping exclusive control over the southern ones. A constitution which decentralised power to the provinces would keep that possibility alive.
The fact that relatively few seats have gone to the Sunnis poses a problem, though it was widely predicted. It was caused mainly by the election boycott called for by the Iraqi Islamic party and the Association of Muslim Scholars.
Since civilians in their region have felt the brunt of US military operations since the dictatorship fell, they made the argument that elections under occupation were unfair, and that the Americans were refusing to give even the vaguest timetable for the occupation's end.
This is what Washington calls a "conditions-based" rather than a "calendar-based" approach to the timing of withdrawal.
Shias and Kurds will have to work out a system by which Sunnis can be offered a reasonable stake in the constitution-drafting process.
Even before yesterday's announcement of the result, Iraq's leading politicians invited the Sunnis to take part. The Sunnis have not yet decided on their response.
The two main Sunni groupings are religious, but they appear to be less concerned about getting Islamic views on divorce and women's property and other rights reflected in a constitution than the Shia religious parties are. So they may not combine with the Shias in the drafting committees.
The first set of bargaining will centre on the choice of prime minister. The Americans have more than one candidate they could live with.
In spite of the election, the US retains a major behind-the-scenes role. But since the cabinet will be a coalition of different parties, the prime minister will not have the same power as Ayad Allawi, the current incumbent, who was essentially appointed by the US.
The turnout figure of 58%, announced yesterday, is high enough to give credibility to the new assembly, though it is much lower than hoped by those who hailed the poll two weeks ago as a triumph of freedom.
The election was flawed in many ways since it was hard for small parties to get their message across, and even the big parties did not have their programmes widely published.
Some voters took part because of the poll's significance as the first contested election in their lifetimes. Others had worries about jobs, power cuts, and security.
Now they have a government which will have to listen.
-------
Comment