Iraq takes another step down a long, hard road

Dec 19th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Votes were being counted on Friday after an encouraging turnout in the previous day's election in Iraq. The poll was free of large-scale violence and saw wide participation by Sunnis. But it will be hard to construct a government that all can accept, and harder still to defeat the insurgency and turn Iraq into something approaching a normal country

GEORGE BUSH compared Iraq last week to America just after it gained independence. Islamists called the general election held on Thursday December 15th a “satanic project”. The reality is, of course, somewhere between the two. In the run-up to the vote, Iraq continued to be wracked by violence. However, polling day itself saw only a few small bombings and mortar attacks, and voters streamed to the polls in refreshingly high numbers, with 10m-plus votes cast, amounting to a turnout of around 70%. Polling was extended by an hour in some places. "The real triumph is that people are casting ballots, whoever they choose, and that they've chosen voting over bombs,” said Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister, after casting his vote.

Opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the election suggested that Iraqi citizens feel only a shaky commitment to the country as a whole, as opposed to tribe, ethnicity or religion. But they are also, by and large, aware that the “satanic project”, beginning with the vote on Thursday and ending in the formation of a government, must go through if they are ever to enjoy peace, and if foreign troops are ever to leave with any claim to victory.

The new government will be Iraq's first full-term, fully constitutional one since the downfall of Saddam Hussein. The current government, elected in January, served just long enough to draft a constitution. The administration assembled after last week’s poll will be expected to govern for four years. Can a stable and legitimate government be chosen that will begin to erode support for the insurgency?

The best news, emphasised in Mr Bush’s speech, is the participation of the Sunni Arabs in the poll. Predominantly Sunni cities like Ramadi, which saw a paltry few thousand turn out when most Sunnis boycotted the January election, were completely different on Thursday. January's boycott was costly. With almost no Sunni deputies in parliament, the constitution was written largely over the heads of a group that is some 20% of Iraq’s population—though Sunni representatives were later invited into the process by the majority Shia Arabs (around 60% of the population) and the Kurds (some 20%).

As a result, the Sunnis are none too keen on the document, which creates a highly federal Iraq that they fear could break apart. In the referendum on the constitution, held in October, Sunnis turned out in large numbers to vote against it. Though they nearly managed to defeat it, their participation was seen as an encouraging sign. That they put their efforts into winning seats in last week’s election further suggests Sunni leaders have come to accept that the way forward is through the ballot box, not bombs.

But peaceful politics is the last thing Iraq’s insurgents want. Two days before the election, they murdered Mizhar Dulaimi, a Sunni politician who had appeared on television the night before to exhort all Iraqis to vote. Mr Dulaimi was only one of several prominent Sunnis to be murdered during the election campaign. On Thursday, however, the images beamed around the world were not of roadside bombings, but of Iraqi voters determined to take their future into their ink-stained hands.

The voters faced a dizzying array of choices—some 7,000 candidates from 220 different political groups. But these are batched into larger coalitions, of which several stand out as most likely to form a government. The largest group currently, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is expected to keep the top spot: a preliminary count showed it winning almost 60% in Baghdad, the biggest of Iraq's provinces. Rather than representing a united Iraq, the UIA is now mainly a religious Shia grouping that includes Mr Jaafari. It took 48% of the vote nationwide in January, helped by the Sunni boycott. With Sunnis participating this time, the UIA’s share of the vote will surely fall. But it has the blessing of Iraq’s most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. As a result, one of the group’s most prominent members, Adel Abd al-Mahdi, a moderate Islamist and a current vice-president, stands a good chance of becoming prime minister.

Secularists and Sunnis do not trust the UIA, however. One of its constituent parties is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of which Mr Mahdi is a member. Many SCIRI figures spent time in neighbouring Iran during Saddam’s rule, and Sunnis in particular worry that the party is a front for Iranian influence.

Sunnis have another problem with the UIA: the discovery in recent weeks of prisons in which inmates, mostly Sunnis, have been badly abused (some say tortured) by their largely Shia captors. Mr Jaafari has called the situation unacceptable and promised a full investigation. But the affair has the feel of Shia retribution for their sufferings under Saddam and his Sunni-dominated security services. Sunni nationalists used this fear to get out the vote—“vote for us so you won’t be tortured by them”—which does not bode well for the kind of consensual politics post-election Iraq will require. Two coalitions, the Iraqi Consensus Front (relatively Islamist) and the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue (more secular) were competing for the Sunni nationalist vote. According to the preliminary vote count, the Iraqi Consensus Front captured almost a fifth of the Baghdad vote.

Two main parties tried to appeal across ethnic and religious lines. One is the Iraq National List, headed by Iyad Allawi, Iraq’s first post-Saddam prime minister, who was appointed by the Americans. Mr Allawi, a secular Shia, portrays himself as being tough on the insurgency while also including prominent Sunnis in his group, including Ghazi al-Yawer, Iraq’s first post-Saddam president, and Hachem al-Hassani, the parliament’s speaker. Mr Allawi’s tough-guy image is both his biggest strength and his biggest weakness. While only 14% voted for his group in January, support for it may have grown as the UIA has lost followers and Iraqis look for a hard man to get them through hard times. But anti-Allawi groups criticise his view that de-Baathification—the process of taking all power away from former members of Saddam’s party—may have to be partially reversed; he has been dubbed “Saddam without the moustache”. The preliminary vote count showed a disappointing 14% for Mr Allawi's list.

Mr Allawi’s main personal rival is Ahmed Chalabi, another secular Shia. Mr Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, which during the 1990s was America’s favoured opposition group. Many Americans now distrust him for having fed the Bush administration trumped-up intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, which helped lead to the war to oust Saddam. But Mr Chalabi has reinvented himself in Iraq and won himself some real support. He distinguishes himself from Mr Allawi by supporting a more radical de-Baathification, and by showing a greater willingness to negotiate with insurgents.

With so many groups jostling for votes, the election is unlikely to have produced a clear winner, so weeks of political wrangling are now expected. The job of assembling a government is made more difficult still by a rule stating that the president, prime minister and cabinet need the approval of two-thirds of the parliament.

It will not take long for tensions to surface. Sunnis want to revise the constitution, limiting the ability of provinces to join and form powerful super-regions. But keeping the document as it is suits the Shias and Kurds, who live on top of most of Iraq’s oil. Kanan Makiya, a respected secular Iraqi and professor at America’s Brandeis University, appealed last week in the New York Times for an overhaul of the constitution that would postpone the formation of super-regions for at least ten years, while Iraqis create a properly functioning state centred on Baghdad and defeat the insurgency.

Mr Bush will be hoping that Iraq can be turned into something approaching a normal country long before then. But as American voters become increasingly uneasy about the continuing instability, the White House seems to have realised that they can no longer simply be told things are going well, or that the mere fact of an election constitutes success. Last week, for the first time, Mr Bush offered a figure for Iraqis killed in the conflict so far: around 30,000, plus 2,140 American dead. In other recent speeches, including an Oval Office address on Sunday, the president has acknowledged more clearly than before that America has made mistakes in Iraq, though he continues to focus on reasons for optimism. Both in Iraq and abroad, a peaceful election followed by the reasonably orderly construction of a new, full-term government would be cause for celebration. But as even Mr Bush acknowledges, it would be just another step down a long, hard road.

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