The calm before the storm

Jan 25th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Militants in Iraq have declared “bitter war” against democracy and are feared to be saving their resources for massive attacks during this weekend’s elections. The insurgency, which shows no signs of abating, is only one of several serious worries about Iraq’s future

IN THE final few days before Iraq’s elections, there has been a marked fall in the intensity of insurgents’ attacks. General Erv Lessel, an American military chief in Baghdad, even went so far as to call it “a calm before the storm”, in a CNN television interview. There were few signs of calm on the streets of Iraq’s capital, with the insurgents murdering a senior judge and shooting dead several Iraqi policemen on Tuesday. Nevertheless, Mr Lessel said he feared the insurgents were saving some of their resources to launch a round of spectacular attacks around polling day, Sunday January 30th. Despite the relative lull, there is little cause for optimism that the insurgency is abating, nor that it will do so once a new Iraqi government is in place.

Having failed to force the Americans and the interim Iraqi government to abandon the elections, the insurgents, who are mainly drawn from the Sunni Arab minority, are now trying to terrify voters into staying at home. A recording released on Sunday, and attributed to the most notorious insurgent leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian allied to al-Qaeda, declared “a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it” and called on fellow Sunnis to attack “infidel voters”.

The insurgents’ attacks on candidates, election officials and polling stations have succeeded in forcing most of the 111 party groupings contesting the elections to keep secret the names of all but their most senior leaders until election day. So those Iraqis who risk the bombs and bullets, and turn up to cast their ballots, will have little idea whom they are selecting for the 275-seat national assembly and 18 provincial assemblies.

Nevertheless, opinion surveys have suggested that the country’s Shia Muslim majority—around 60% of the 27m population—and Kurds—about 20%—are keen to vote. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric, has issued a fatwa compelling the faithful to cast their ballots. All this encouraged the Americans and the interim Iraqi government to reject calls by some mainstream Sunni groups for the elections to be postponed.


The interim government announced on Monday that it had captured one of Mr Zarqawi’s top lieutenants, Abu Omar al-Kurdi, saying that he had admitted responsibility for three-quarters of all car-bombings in Iraq since the insurgency began. However, the insurgency is likely to continue, at a high intensity, for long after the elections. President George Bush is expected to ask Congress early next month for a further $80 billion for America’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress has already approved $120 billion for Iraq (and $60 billion for Afghanistan).

Almost 1,400 American military personnel have been killed in Iraq so far. Many more have been injured and more still are having to serve longer-than-expected periods away from home. Troop levels have been boosted from 138,000 earlier this year to around 150,000, to provide added security for the elections. Military commanders’ hopes to bring the numbers back down to 138,000 by the middle of the year now look too optimistic.

The re-formed Iraqi security forces are still a long way from being able to take on the insurgents without the help of troops from America, Britain and other allies. Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent a retired general, Gary Luck, to assess the state of military operations in Iraq. He has recommended that the training of Iraqi forces be accelerated, and that the number of American military trainers working alongside them be raised sharply. But they are likely to remain weak, disorganised and prone to desertions and infiltration.

Just as worryingly, some Iraqi security men seem to be reviving the sort of torture and abuses of prisoners that were routine practice under Saddam Hussein, according to a report this week from Human Rights Watch, an American group. Its findings will horrify observers from outside Iraq. However, they may not do much damage to the electoral prospects of the interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, and his coalition, the Iraqi List, who have been campaigning on a tough law-and-order platform.

No turbans allowed

In as much as it has been possible to measure voters’ intentions amid the chaos and bloodshed, it appears that Mr Allawi’s group (which includes mainly secular Shias and some moderate Sunnis) is likely to be beaten by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a Shia coalition that claims Mr Sistani’s approval (though he has not endorsed it publicly). To dispel fears that the coalition is seeking to make Iraq an Iranian-style theocracy, one of its leaders, Adnan Ali, insisted in Monday’s New York Times that they planned to form a secular administration in which clerics would hold no ministerial posts: there would be “no turbans in the government”, he said.

This would appear to rule out one of the coalition’s key figures, Abdelaziz al-Hakim, a cleric who has until now seemed a leading candidate to become prime minister after Sunday’s elections. Thus if the UIA wins, the prime minister’s job is likely to go to a secular Shia, such as Adil Abdul Mahdi, currently Iraq’s finance minister, or Ahmed Chalabi, a former exile who has fallen out with his erstwhile friends in Washington.

Besides choosing the new government, the new, Shia-dominated national assembly will have the important job of writing a new Iraqi constitution. The concentration of the insurgency in Sunni areas and Sunni parties’ calls for an election boycott mean that Sunnis are likely to be badly under-represented in this constitution-writing exercise. Unless great efforts are made to make them feel that their views are being taken into account, the constitution could thus become another spark that helps ignite a civil war. Or several: prolonged chaos across the rest of the country could prompt Iraq’s Kurds, in their relatively peaceful northern provinces, to make a bid for independence, possibly triggering a war over the bitterly disputed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Keeping a lid on all of this, while resisting the temptation to revert to Saddam-era repression, will be a colossal challenge for the new government that Iraqis—or at least those brave enough to vote—will choose this weekend.

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