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Friday's election
results make it nearly impossible to stop the
country from descending into full-blown civil war.
There's no one left to put Humpty Dumpty together
again in Baghdad. Zalmay Khalilzad, America's
feckless ambassador in Iraq, is trying. But,
unwilling or unable to reach out to the Iraqi
resistance, Khalilzad instead finds himself immersed
instead in gooey egg mass. The Iraqi body politic is
shattered, with little hope now of avoiding an
all-out civil war. That's the only conclusion that
can be reached by looking at the results of the Dec.
15 elections in Iraq, whose official returns were
announced on Friday.
Those results gave the Shiite religious bloc 128
seats out of 275. Their junior partners, the two
Kurdish warlord parties, got 53. The religious
Sunnis got 44, the secular Sunni parties got 11, and
Iyad Allawi's non-ethnic, secular alliance got 25.
So the coalition of Shiite fundamentalists and
Kurdish warlords controls 181 seats, at least, just
a few votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to
form a government. Let's look at the bad news, item
by item.
First, the Arab League's peace initiative for Iraq
is dead. It was, I've written, perhaps the last best
hope for holding Iraq together and avoiding an
ethnic-sectarian war. The effort began last fall,
when Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan organized an
initiative to hold talks between Iraq's
Shiite-Kurdish government, the Sunni-led opposition,
and the resistance. Scheduled for Cairo last
November, the first meeting failed when the two
fundamentalist Shiite parties, Al Dawa and the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
said that they would not talk to the insurgents,
whom they describe as "terrorists." (That word, in
fact, is increasingly used by SCIRI and Al Dawa to
refer to all Sunnis in Iraq, not just to Abu Musab
Al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda or even to the Baathist-military
resistance.)
In December, I wrote for TomPaine.com that the Arab
League effort would collapse if the SCIRI-Dawa
forces, augmented by the fanatical Mahdi Army of
Muqtada Sadr, won big in the elections. They did,
winning nearly half of the seats in the new
parliament. So, no surprise: on Saturday, Iraq's
foreign minister, a Kurd, announced that the
scheduled Arab League follow up meeting in February,
which had been dubbed a National Accord Conference,
would not be held.
Second, the notion that Iraq can form a "national
unity government" now, led by the SCIRI-Dawa-Mahdi
Army coalition, is beyond absurd. Khalilzad,
described by The New York Times, as the "unabashedly
hands-on U.S. ambassador," is pushing hard for the
inclusion of some docile Sunnis in the new
government. "The advice of Zal, as he is known here,
will not be subtle," says the Times , hopefully. And
listen to the pathetically naïve musings of a
"senior U.S. official" in Iraq, quoted by Reuters:
For us Iraq can't build on a relatively narrower
sectarian or ethnic basis. It has to be inclusive.
We support a unity government as the best means of
bringing Iraqis together after a hard-fought
election contest, and we are encouraging all sides
in this to look to the advantages. In the end it's
an Iraqi decision not an American decision. We are
prepared to help the Iraqis in any way we can to
reach an agreement that brings the country together,
broadens the base of support of the Iraqi government
and results in a competent and capable government.
In fact, however, the all-or-nothing sectarianism of
Iraq is now set in stone. That is thanks to nearly
three years of U.S. mismanagement in Iraq, during
which time the United States first insisted on
installing in power the creatures that populated
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its
exile allies, then forced every Iraqi institution
from the 2003 Iraqi Governing Council to the interim
government of Iyad Allawi on down to apportion its
power according to some ethnic and sectarian census,
meanwhile encouraging the SCIRI-Dawa alliance to
establish its power, and its paramilitary forces,
throughout southern Iraq.
Why is a national unity government impossible?
Because the 55 Sunnis who were elected to the
parliament do not represent the resistance, and so
they cannot exercise influence over the fighters
opposed to the U.S. occupation. And, even among
those Sunnis who will now take up seats in the
parliament, only a handful -- perhaps the Iraqi
Islamic Party and a few others -- are willing to
join the Shiite-dominated regime. Therefore,
Khalilzad cannot succeed in creating a broad-based
Iraqi government that can successfully appeal to the
resistance. All the king's horses and all the king's
U.S. troops can't do it.
Making everything worse is the fact that the
hard-line Shiites, especially Abdel Aziz Al Hakim
and Adel Abdel Mahdi of SCIRI, have ruled out even
minor compromises with the Sunni opposition. Their
policy is: No to "the terrorists," no to changes in
the divisive Iraqi constitution, and no to the Arab
League. By refusing to change the constitution, the
Shiites insist on the imposition of sharia-style
Islamic courts, insist on grabbing nearly all of
Iraq's future oil revenues for the Shiite south,
insist on creating breakaway "federal" states in the
Kurdish north and the Shiite south, insist on giving
Kirkuk to the revanchist and expansionist Kurds, and
more.
That's the ersatz constitution, you will recall,
that passed in a referendum on Oct. 15, despite the
fact that 50 of its 130 clauses hadn't yet been
finished, despite the fact that copies of the
document weren't printed and circulated to the
population that was voting, despite the fact that it
was written in secret (under U.S. supervision) by
the Shiite-Kurd majority over the objections of the
token Sunnis in the room. The Sunni community was
tricked into voting on Oct. 15 and then Dec. 15 by
promises that the constitution's bad provisions
could be amended. Now, SCIRI says: No such luck.
Making things even worse, the Shiites continue to
insist that Sunnis who were elected to the
parliament are too close to the resistance and are
therefore "terrorists." This is not an argument
calculated to win friends among the Sunni bloc. If
SCIRI demands that Sunni politicians disavow the
armed resistance, they will succeed only in
recruiting a handful of quislings into the
quisling-run regime in Baghdad.
It's part and parcel of the dead-end "de-Baathification"
scheme that was pushed so far by Chalabi that has
now been twisted to the most extreme interpretation.
"The Shiites have turned de-Baathification into de-Sunnification,"
according to Salman Al Jumayli, spokesperson for the
Sunni Accordance Front, which has 44 seats in the
coming parliament. "They're only targeting Sunnis
and they've turned it into a weapon to get rid of
all their political opponents." Khalilzad seems
genuinely distressed by this, but he is at a loss
over what to do about it. What seems clear is that
the signals put out by Khalilzad before the
election, about being willing to talk to the
resistance, have been extinguished, along with
Allawi's hopes of getting enough seats to create a
nonsectarian, centrist (and pro-U.S.) government.
So what's left is an increasingly Iran-leaning,
Shiite fundamentalist theocracy with a rump Kurdish
republic attached to it. And you can put this in
your signs-of-things-to-come file: Muqtada Sadr, the
cherubic (and Rubenesque) militant young cleric,
said on Sunday that the Mahdi Army, which is now a
big part of the Iraqi government to be, says that
his forces will fight alongside Iran's if Iran is
attacked by the United States over its nuclear
program.
So it's curtains for Bush's "victory or defeat"
policy. The insurgency will strengthen, so that
won't help. The Shiites are likely to move in an
increasingly radical (and pro-Iranian direction), so
that won't help. The violence will get worse.
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in
Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and
national security issues.
www.alternet.org
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