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With the bombing and
destruction on February 22 of the al-Askari shrine
-- one of the holiest sites of Shi'a Islam -- and
the nearly immediate retaliatory attacks on Sunni
mosques throughout Iraq, the military phase of the
struggle over the country's political future
overwhelmed and derailed its political dynamics, as
the Sunni Arab bloc in Iraq's new parliament -- the
National Accord Front (N.A.C.) -- broke off its
participation in negotiations over the composition
of a government to replace the outgoing transitional
administration. Although a cycle of sectarian
violence, marked by killings on both sides, had been
building and intensifying for months, the al-Askari
bombing precipitated the first open admission by
Iraq's fragmented political class that the country
was entering the condition of full-scale civil war.
As PINR has consistently projected for more than two
years, the deep conflicts of interest between the
three major ethnic-religious groups -- Shi'a Arabs,
Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds -- would reach a
critical point when the time came for the country's
political forces to negotiate a permanent settlement
of their differences or to move toward separation.
That moment arrived with the December 15, 2005
elections for a four-year parliament, which forced
the political class to confront its stark divisions
in the context of having to form a government. [See:
"Iraq's Election Aftermath Reveals a Failed State"]
As negotiations for a government proceeded from late
December into February, it became clear that an
agreement on its composition would prove to be
difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Each
player in the process was compelled to clarify its
demands, revealing profound and -- according to the
players -- irreconcilable conflicts. Rather than
signifying an interruption of the political process,
the al-Askari bombing and its aftermath vividly
symbolize the failure of that process.
Behind the violence, which justifiably occupies the
attention of the media and decision makers in the
short term, are the persistent interests that
surfaced in the negotiations as a series of
non-negotiable demands by each side against the
others. The phrase that dominated public discussion
of the bargaining process in Iraq was "red line,"
meaning a limit beyond which a player would not go
in making concessions to its adversaries. Rather
than seeking compromise, the players engaged in
drawing a crazy quilt of red lines, resulting in
deadlock.
A sign as telling as the al-Askari bombing that the
political process had broken down was the decision
on February 20, 2006 by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad to go public with a threat to cut
off aid to Iraq's security forces if the Iraqi
political class did not agree to form a "national
unity government" in which each sectarian and ethnic
bloc had a share in power and subsumed its militia
under a national army and police force.
Asserting that the U.S. is "not going to invest the
resources of the American people and build forces
that are run by people who are sectarian," Khalilzad
abandoned the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that had
been his trademark in favor of blunt external
pressure that had little credibility -- an admission
of frustration. As the players proceeded on a
collision course, Washington's influence over the
negotiations steadily diminished to the point at
which it has become a bystander reduced to issuing
warnings from the sidelines.
Red Lines Proliferate
The stage was set for deadlock on February 11, when
the Shi'a bloc -- the United Iraqi Alliance (U.I.A.)
-- which has the largest number of seats in the new
parliament voted 64-63 to name Ibrahim al-Jaafari,
the transitional prime minister, as its choice for
prime minister in the permanent government. The
largest bloc in the new parliament, holding 130 of
its 275 seats against the Sunni N.A.F.'s 55, the
Kurdish Alliance's (K.A.) 53 and the secular Iraqi
National List's (I.N.L.) 25, the U.I.A. has been
beset by internal conflicts between its component
factions that are reflected in al-Jaafari's
razor-thin margin of victory.
Al-Jaafari, who represents the Dawa Party, achieved
his win with the support of anti-occupation cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr, whose faction controls 30 of the
U.I.A.'s seats. Al-Sadr's backing of al-Jaafari was
based on his opposition to Adil Abdul-Mahdi, the
candidate of the U.I.A.'s largest faction, the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (S.C.I.R.I.).
Although the preponderance of the components of the
U.I.A. are based in Shi'a clerical families, those
families and their followers are divided by
longstanding rivalries. The winning coalition of
Dawa and the Sadrists came at the price of honoring
S.C.I.R.I.'s red line that it be awarded control of
the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of
internal security and -- under the transitional
government -- has been in S.C.I.R.I.'s hands and has
been held responsible by Sunnis for sectarian
attacks on their community.
In response to the prospect of continued S.C.I.R.I.
control over the power ministries -- interior and
defense -- N.A.F. leader Adnan al-Dulaimi drew his
own red line, insisting that those portfolios be
given to figures who are not identified with the
Shi'a clerical establishment. Al-Dulaimi's demand
was met by the leader of S.C.I.R.I.'s militia, the
Badr Brigade, with the assertion that S.C.I.R.I.
"will not relinquish the security portfolios."
Building on their deadlock over the power
ministries, the U.I.A. and the N.A.F. drew red lines
on an array of other issues. The U.I.A. insisted
that the N.A.F. condemn "terrorism" and actively
oppose the Sunni-led insurgency, to which the N.A.F.
replied that the U.I.A. must distinguish between
terrorism against civilians and legitimate
resistance against what they consider the U.S.-led
occupation. The N.A.F. demanded an end to the purge
of ex-Ba'ath Party members from public life, which
the U.I.A. rejected. Most importantly, the N.A.F.
demanded that Iraq's current constitution be
modified to restrict regional self-rule and the
U.I.A. insisted that the Shi'a-dominated south, with
its vast oil resources, move to regularize its
substantial autonomy, leaving Sunni Arabs in fear
that the resource-poor center and west of Iraq,
where they are concentrated, will be impoverished.
Reinforcing the Sunni-Shi'a deadlock at the level of
the political class is Sunni public opinion. A
survey conducted by the Program on International
Policy Attitudes and reported in the Washington
Times on February 1 found that only five percent of
Sunni Arabs approved of the December 15, 2005
elections, 92 percent thought that the new
government was illegitimate, and 88 percent approved
of attacks on U.S. forces. Sunni Arab participation
in the political process, which Washington believed
would integrate the Sunni community into a
nation-building project, has not had the desired
effect, but has only worked to reveal the latent
political confrontation.
A little-noticed study conducted by Iraq's Ministry
of Labor and Social Affairs and released in late
January shows some of the reasons for persisting
Sunni Arab disaffection. The study reported that the
poverty level in Iraq has increased by 30 percent
since April 2003, reaching 20 percent of the
population. Two million Iraqis are having difficulty
finding sufficient food and shelter, and live with
an income of less than US$2 per day. The report
attributed rising poverty to the "shutdown of the
public sector," lack of access to education, and
violence, all of which differentially affect the
Sunni Arab population.
Under the pressure of deteriorating living
conditions and the resultant disaffection of public
opinion from a Shi'a-Kurd dominated political
process, the Sunni leadership is constrained to take
a hard line, as its opponents mobilize to maintain
their present advantages and accelerate their drive
toward regional autonomy. As the Sunnis press their
demands, the Shi'a and the Kurds dig in and resist
making any concessions.
Although the seemingly intractable conflict between
Sunni and Shi'a Arabs gained the greatest attention
during the negotiations, the third player in the
struggle over Iraq's future -- the Kurds -- began to
assert their own demands more forcefully and drew
their own red lines. Already running the oil-rich
northern provinces as a mini-state, the Kurdish
Alliance, composed of the Democratic Party of
Kurdistan (P.D.K.) and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (P.U.K.), had allied with the U.I.A.
forces in the transitional government, but had
become dissatisfied with the treatment they had
received and were ready to act more independently in
furthering their interests.
The central interests of the Kurds are to maintain
their effective independence and to gain control of
Kirkuk and its surrounding region, which has large
energy reserves and had been split off from the
Kurdish provinces under Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist
regime. The Kurds complain that the transitional
government, in which the Shi'a had the preponderant
influence, did not facilitate the resettlement of
Kurds who had been displaced from Kirkuk under
Ba'athist rule, and that it failed to put into
effect provisions of the Iraqi constitution and its
subsidiary Law of Administration that require a
census in and a referendum on the status of Kirkuk.
Already in late January 2006, Governor of Kirkuk Abd
al-Rahman Mustafa had threatened to suspend oil
exports to the rest of Iraq if the central
government did not allocate funds for taking the
census and holding the referendum.
The status of Kirkuk became an explicit "red line
issue" when President of the "Kurdistan Region"
Masoud Barzani declared in mid-February that the
situation would have to be resolved constitutionally
by the end of 2007. Accession of Kirkuk to the
Kurdish mini-state is as threatening to the Sunnis
economically as the normalization of a Shi'a
autonomous region would be, and has the added
problem that the city is multi-ethnic, with Arab,
Turkomen and Christian minorities that are resistant
to Kurdish hegemony.
Barzani also drew a red line, as would be expected,
around preservation of constitutional provisions
guaranteeing regional autonomy. In a break with the
Kurdish-Shi'a alliance, Barzani reported that in his
negotiations with the U.I.A. he had insisted that
the secular bloc led by former provisional Prime
Minister Ayad Allawi be included in a national unity
government along with the U.I.A., the N.A.F. and the
K.A., which was a deal breaker for the U.I.A. due to
al-Sadr's rejection of any collaboration with Allawi,
who ordered the suppression of al-Sadr's rebellion
against the occupation in 2004.
Finally, Barzani demanded that the arrangement in
the transitional government whereby a Kurd receives
the presidency be maintained and insisted that the
constitution be changed to grant the president
greater powers at the expense of the prime minister.
In his most revealing comment in a February 10
interview with al-Arabiya television, Barzani said
that Kurdistan would secede from Iraq if a Sunni-Shi'a
civil war broke out and forthrightly declared that
the Kurds had a right to their own independent
state, although "we are aware of the international
and internal circumstances" standing in the way of
one.
It was in the face of the collapsing Iraqi political
process that Khalilzad delivered his threat of an
aid cut-off. He had preceded his public announcement
by publishing an opinion column -- "Blueprint for a
National Government" -- in which he laid out
Washington's own red line -- a national unity
government. Recognizing that marginalization and
isolation of the Sunni Arabs is at the core of the
deadlock, Khalilzad made a scarcely veiled demand
that the Kurds and the Shi'a concede to Sunni
demands.
Using hard rhetoric, Khalilzad wrote that Iraqi
leaders "must" give "political minorities confidence
that the majority will share power and take their
legitimate concerns into account." Specifically,
Khalilzad went on, the government "must" disband
factional militias and the Defense and Interior
Ministries have to be staffed "on the basis of
competence, not ethnic or sectarian background." He
warned that the Sunni-led insurgency would only be
curbed if regional powers are not "allowed to
dominate Iraq" and de-Ba'athification is limited to
"high-ranking officials, integrating all those who
did not commit crimes into mainstream society." On
the root issue of regional autonomy, Khalilzad was
direct: "Iraqi leaders must strike agreements that
will win greater Sunni Arab support and create a
near-consensus in favor of the constitution."
Having incorporated the entire Sunni position into
his list of demands, Khalilzad's blueprint met with
a predictable rejectionist response from the Shi'a
and Kurds who accused him of violating Iraqi
sovereignty and going back on U.S. policy by
attempting to dictate a resolution of the conflict.
In a telling and scathing paragraph-by-paragraph
critique of Khalilzad's essay, Kurdish analyst Dr.
Rebwar Fatah concluded: "Khalilzad's blueprint for
Iraqi national unity will be as successful as the
British Iraq. The difference is that in the early
20th century, imposing superficial nation-states
over ethnic and religious groups was possible by
bloodshed, but in the 21st century, the mission of
Iraqi national unity shall remain a myth."
Conclusion
The moment of reckoning has arrived in post-Ba'athist
Iraq and none of the major players shows a trace of
the will to compromise that would be necessary to
construct a genuine nation-state, in which diverse
social groups have an overriding commitment to live
together.
Even if civil war is averted in the short term and a
government is formed, that government will not be a
genuine national-unity administration, but an arena
of conflict between contending power groups. In one
of the most astute observations on the situation by
an Iraqi politician, Abdul-Mahdi -- the S.C.I.R.I.-backed
candidate in the U.I.A.'s election for the
prospective prime minister -- shrugged off his loss,
saying that any new government would not be popular
and would not be likely to serve out a four-year
term.
A weak central government, which seems to be
inevitable, will be starved for funds and will have
trouble enforcing security given the preponderant
slide toward confederal regionalism. Ministerial
portfolios will be allocated according to
ethnic-religious groups, and ministries will tend to
coalesce into self-enclosed fiefdoms -- as they
already have in the transitional government -- that
effectively resist coordinated direction from high
political officials. With each major bloc demanding
positions with real power, there will not be enough
to go around and dissatisfaction will build among
those who feel they have been slighted.
Most importantly, the red lines that the contending
players have drawn are not preliminary negotiating
positions, but reflect deeply embedded perceptions
of vital interests that are resistant to
reconciliation.
Washington has neither the trust nor the credibility
nor the resources to impose its blueprint and will
have to watch its efforts unravel. Fatah, the
Kurdish analyst, perceptively observed that "the
frustration that Khalilzad demonstrates in his
article could be interpreted as some degree of a
resignation." Increasingly resigned to the collapse
of all its plans for Iraq, Washington has been
placed in a no-win situation. It has no prospect of
a graceful exit and seems fated to preside
helplessly over Iraq's disintegration.
Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
www.pinr.com
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