Two months on, still no Iraqi government

Mar 30th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Iraq’s parliament, which has again failed to choose a government, is looking like a poor advertisement for democracy, two months after its election. Unless agreement is reached soon, an opportunity to quench the still-raging insurgency may be missed

IT WAS a farcical scene. For only the second time since a widely acclaimed general election two months ago, Iraq’s parliament met again on Tuesday March 29th—and achieved precisely nothing. This time, MPs did not even make florid appeals for national unity, as they did at the inaugural session two weeks ago. Instead, one after another, they got up to denounce the main parties for failing to produce a coalition government, and demanded to know what was going on behind closed doors.

After about 20 minutes of angry discord, the parliament’s acting speaker ejected the watching media from the chamber and Iraq’s state television, which had been beaming the proceedings, suddenly cut to a music concert. At this point, the interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi (whose Iraqi List did poorly in the election but may yet join a coalition government) got up and walked out. Across Baghdad, indignant Iraqis asked each other if this was what they had defied the insurgents on election day to achieve.

But things are not quite as bad as they look. The two main groups, the Shia Muslim-led United Iraqi Alliance and a coalition embracing the two main Kurdish parties, still say that they have resolved, at least temporarily, the biggest differences between them, deferring the thorniest one, over the final status of the disputed city of Kirkuk, until later. The final stumbling block to forming a government is over how to bring Sunni Arabs into it. And the main trouble in this respect is that, since most Sunni Arabs refused or were too afraid to vote in January’s election, no one knows who really represents them.

The Shias and Kurds had already agreed that parliament’s speaker and one of two vice-presidents should, among other posts, be Sunni Arabs. The latest hiccup has been caused by the outgoing interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, a well-connected Sunni Arab who had been tapped for the speaker’s job but who suddenly announced that he wanted to be a vice-president instead. The Shias produced their own Sunni candidate, other Sunnis in the parliament bristled at having a representative forced on them and the fragile consensus collapsed. MPs now say that the Sunnis have until April 3rd to come up with a candidate—or the rest of the Shia- and Kurdish-dominated body will decide for them.

Compared with the Shias or Kurds, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are badly divided. A number of Sunni-dominated groups ran in the recent general election but barely a score of Sunni Arabs, scattered across a number of different lists, won seats in the 275-member parliament. So no one knows who would have done well had the vast majority of Sunnis not stayed away from the poll.

Moreover, many local Sunni leaders say that their constituents will accept no one who fought against Saddam Hussein’s regime from exile or who participated in the governments which followed his demise, which rules out nearly all of those Sunni Arabs who were elected in January.

Still, Sunni leaders are belatedly trying to get their act together. Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein (a monarchist), Adnan Pachachi (a liberal), Hashem al-Hassani (an Islamist) and a clutch of others have held a series of conferences with the aim of producing a coherent Sunni agenda. Sharif Ali, in particular, has won the blessing of at least some members of the Muslim Scholars’ Board, an influential but strongly anti-American Sunni clerics’ body which told its people to boycott the election and is insisting that the new government should meet a string of demands, running from the rehabilitation of purged Baathists to the release of political prisoners and a withdrawal deadline for American troops, as the price of co-operation.

The Sunnis also demand not just the speaker’s post and a vice-presidency, but also a security ministry, either defence or interior. If a Sunni Arab had one of those key jobs, he might be able to persuade at least some of the insurgents to put down their arms. As it is, they appear—for the first time since the insurgency got going in earnest 18 months ago—to be on the defensive.

Attacks in February dropped to 40-50 a day, their lowest level since the Americans first assaulted the rebel stronghold of Fallujah a year ago. While the rate has gone up a bit in the last few weeks, the rebels are no longer massing troops to overrun police stations or take over Iraqi towns wholesale.

In contrast, Iraqi government troops are fighting more aggressively, and the insurgents’ mystique is fading, thanks in part to popular television programmes such as “Terror in the Hands of Justice”, which shows broken rebel captives confessing to everything from contract killings to homosexual orgies. Iraqi police say this has led to a surge in the number of tips from citizens, who now take a more scornful and less fearful view of the guerrillas.

Many Sunni politicians who have embraced the new order (even though they have yet to be slotted into government) say that more insurgents now want to lay down their arms. That still excludes dedicated Islamists linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who claims to be Osama bin Laden’s main man in Iraq, and criminal and Baathist networks. But many Sunni Arab regular soldiers from Mr Hussein’s era who took up arms in reaction to American raids and weapons searches in their homes, and to the apparently haphazard arrest of many of their relatives, may be thinking of giving up.

The success of the election has convinced them that they will not topple the new post-invasion political order; they would now rather make their peace with it. What is stopping them is fear for their and their families’ security. If they come out into the open and hand in their arsenals, they may be arrested by American troops or targeted for assassination by Shia militias. What might persuade them to give up is a trusted Sunni Arab military veteran sitting at the negotiating table as minister of defence or interior.

Iraq’s incoming rulers, however, seem loth to let that happen. The one of the two main Shia parties in the winning alliance, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, says there are already too many Baathist sympathisers in the new armed forces and intelligence service; and it wants to control the security ministries to purge them even more thoroughly. But if the Sunni Arabs and Shias cannot overcome these differences, the post-election window of opportunity for a negotiated settlement with at least some of the insurgents may close.

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