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Iraq: Protest, Democracy, and Autocracy |
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Iraq: Protest, Democracy, and Autocracy
29.3.2011
By Marina Ottaway, Danial Anas Kaysi , Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace |
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March
29, 2011
Despite its much-publicized, American-installed
democratic system, Iraq has proven to be no less
vulnerable to street protests than other countries
in the region. Since early February, a continuous
stream of relatively modest protests has unfolded.
Although in a democratic political system citizens
are supposedly able to put pressure on the
government and hold it accountable by relying on
institutional channels, Iraqis appear to have
concluded that—like people in authoritarian
countries—they will not be heard unless they take to
the streets in number.
It is not surprising that they had not reached such
a conclusion because, for well over a year, Iraq has
been consumed by pure politics devoid of policy: a
fierce battle for electoral votes and, even more
brazenly, nine months of jockeying by politicians
about who would form the government and who would
get what, with little regard for the problems of the
country or the needs of its citizens. Even the
government formed in
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Iraqi Kurds protesters take part in a demonstration
in Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region of Iraq, March 11,
2011 Reuters |
December remains focused on
politics without policies; witness the large amount
of legislation that has been accumulating in
parliament without being passed.
Protests so far have engendered plenty of rhetoric
but no significant corrective action on the part of
the government. Political repercussions, however,
have been significant. The demonstrations have
further undermined the already tenuous governing
alliance, as parties seek to blame each other and
several politicians reconsider their relationship
with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In addition,
they have led to the resignation of several
provincial governors and to new tensions between the
central government and provincial councils. While
Maliki’s government does not yet appear seriously
threatened, it has been shaken.
In the same period, protest has also broken out in
Kurdistan, although it has been largely limited to
Sulaimaniyah. While all demonstrators in Iraq share
some similar concerns—particularly about economic
hardship and government corruption—protests in the
two parts of the country have followed different
paths and engendered different government responses.
Indeed, the protests highlight the degree to which
Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq function separately
from each other. Protesters in each part of the
country organize independently, and there is no
discernible spillover effect from one to the other.
Maliki Turns to Carrots and
Sticks
Protests broke out in Iraq on February 4 and
continued in the following days with rather
small-scale demonstrations in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra,
Ramadi, and Diwaniya. Protesters voiced discontent
with the government’s failure to improve
services—electricity shortages being a major
complaint—and the de facto cutbacks (because of
unavailability) in the food rations the government
had been distributing since well before the U.S.-led
invasion. The government’s response was remarkably
swift, showing that it was aware—after weeks of
protests elsewhere—that small incidents can mushroom
into upheavals and that economic demands have
political implications.
First came the economic promises. The parliament’s
financial commission declared the government would
create 288,000 jobs once the budget was
approved—which Maliki confirmed officially several
weeks later—and Maliki announced the government
would give 15,000 dinars (about U.S.$12) monthly to
each citizen to make up for the decrease in food
rations. He also promised that electricity shortages
would end by winter.
Then came the political steps, which were modest in
terms of substance but belied the government’s
fears. In a populist gesture, Maliki immediately
declared that he would cut his own salary—believed
to be over 41 million dinars (about U.S.$350,000) a
year—in half, putting pressure on other officials to
do the same. On February 5, he announced that he
would not run for a third term—a strange promise
because a prime minister does not “run” for
office—and that he would seek a constitutional
amendment imposing a two-term limit on the position.
Meant to allay concerns that Maliki intended to
become prime minister for life, the promises showed
that he saw himself more as a president with a
popular mandate than as a prime minister responsible
to the parliament. Maliki and other government
officials, including Parliament Speaker Osama
Nujeifi, also hastened to reassure the public that,
because the government was being responsive,
protests need not escalate.
As protests continued in the following days,
government officials made more concessions, at times
appearing to compete with each other to demonstrate
that they considered the public’s demands justified
and would do their best to implement appropriate
reforms. Speaker Nujeifi pledged that the parliament
would make sure the electricity shortages would be
addressed and that the food supplies needed to
service the ration cards would be available. Maliki
exhorted ministers and governors to mingle with the
protesters and listen to their demands and
grievances.
But the government also used force to end the
protests. When demonstrators in Wasit province set
the governor’s house and a section of the
governorate building on fire—allegedly after waiting
for hours for an official to open the door and hear
their demands—security officials reportedly
responded by firing live ammunition, killing at
least one person. Maliki called for an
investigation, but the governor called the
protesters thugs with no justifiable demands.
Baghdad Operations Command denounced all protests as
a Baathist plan to create chaos, while the Baghdad
Provincial Council accused al-Qaeda of being behind
the demonstrations.
On February 21, Maliki himself, while continuing to
promise to address the grievances swiftly, declared
there were too many protests and accused unnamed
parties of fomenting unrest to reap unspecified
advantages. The next day, he accused the Baathists
of being behind the Wasit protest. In another venue,
he declared that people with “evil intentions” were
determined to destroy the political process and
bring back the days of armed groups and foreign
intervention. And when protesters called for a “day
of rage” on February 25, the Baghdad Operations
Command responded by imposing a curfew on vehicular
traffic beginning the night before the protest, in
an attempt to reduce the number of participants by
forcing them to walk long distances.
With the call for a February 25 day of rage, the
protest took on a more political tone. It was no
longer isolated groups asking for better services,
but angry citizens challenging the government. As a
result, politicians started positioning themselves
to avoid becoming targets. Maliki declared that
people had the right to protest but also said that
this was not the right time to do so. He warned of
infiltrators determined to create violence and
appealed to Iraqis not to participate. President
Jalal Talabani announced he would defer to the prime
minister and kept silent.
The ministry of interior (still headed by Maliki as
caretaker minister) claimed to possess numerous
documents showing al-Qaeda intended to commit
terrorist acts targeting the protest. In response,
eight militant groups—including some suspected of
having links to al-Qaeda—announced they would
suspend all activities on February 25 to give
protesters a chance to demonstrate peacefully. The
heads of the Sunni, Shi’a, and Christian endowment
offices issued a joint statement pleading with
would-be protesters to give the government time to
implement the newly approved 2011 budget, which they
said would address many of the problems. At the same
time, though, some Shi’a religious authorities
backed the protest, including Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, who declared through a spokesman that
protest was a democratic right—and, indeed, a
representative of Sistani even joined the protesters
in Baghdad.
The day of rage turned out to be a relatively minor
affair, certainly compared with what was happening
elsewhere. Protests took place simultaneously in
many cities, but the scale was unimpressive—reports
from most cities cited participation only in the
hundreds of people; even in Baghdad, a few thousand
people, at most, took to the streets. But the
protests were definitely angrier and more political
than past demonstrations, and so was the
government’s response.
In Baghdad, demonstrators took down some barriers
around the Green Zone and proceeded inside, where
they denounced the U.S. occupation and the police
state in Baghdad. In Nineveh, protesters asked for
the resignation of the provincial council and for
the reform of the central government, dramatizing
their demands by setting fire to the provincial
council building; Speaker Nujeifi and his brother,
Nineveh Governor Atheel Nujeifi, were inside.
Protesters also set fire to a government building in
Mosul.
While February 25 hardly qualified as a day of rage,
its political impact was remarkable. First, the
protests triggered a wave of resignations, not in
the central government but on the part of governors
and local police officials. Second, the protests
shook the already tenuous governing alliance,
leading several parties to put some distance between
themselves and Maliki and to reconsider their
options. Third, the demonstrations affected the
relationship between the central government and the
provinces, as Maliki and other officials at the
center sought to scapegoat provincial officials, who
in turn pushed back.
Beleaguered Officials
Resign
Iraq’s political system is less centralized than
that of most Arab states. While a trend toward
increasing centralization in Baghdad clearly
exists—as does the monopolization of power in
Maliki’s hands—Iraq has elected provincial councils
(the provincial governors are appointed). It also
has local councils, although they were formed six
years ago in a nondemocratic process that mixed
outright appointments with consultation and have not
been renewed since.
The relative decentralization of the system affected
the protests as well. The crowds taking to the
streets targeted not only issues of common concern
throughout the country—from electricity shortages to
corruption—but also specific local grievances, often
expressed as demands for local officials to resign.
And resign many did, with surprising speed. The day
of rage led in short order to the resignation of
Governor Shiltagh Abboud in Basra and Governor
Salman al-Zirkani in Babil, both State of Law
coalition members targeted specifically by the
demonstrators. A number of police chiefs and some
high-ranking provincial officials around the country
quit as well.
Shifting Center-Periphery Relations
Resignations were only part of the story. The
protests also triggered a series of changes—or
attempted changes—in the relationship among federal,
provincial, and local officials, who all sought to
shift blame onto each other for the problems the
protesters were denouncing.
Maliki sought to blame the provincial and local
councils. Shortly after the day of rage, he called
for early provincial council elections, as well as
for the renewal of local councils. But provincial
council elections had been held in January 2009, and
their members, not surprisingly, were united in
rejecting early elections, arguing that the dismal
status of service delivery was due not to their
neglect but to the sluggishness of the ministries
and the central government.
Maliki also tried to force the resignation of the
governors of Wasit and Nineveh. He was successful in
Wasit, where Governor Latif Hamad al-Turfa (a State
of Law member) was forced to resign by the
provincial council. The issue there was essentially
corruption. In addition to the accusation that his
mishandling of earlier protests had led to
casualties, allegations of corruption against Turfa
had already been referred to the independent
Commission on Integrity.
But Maliki was not successful in Nineveh, where the
situation was more complex. First, Governor Atheel
Nujeifi, a brother of the parliament speaker, did
not belong to Maliki’s State of Law coalition. A
Sunni with a strong power base in an important
province bordering on Kurdistan, he had joined the
Iraqiya coalition in the elections and had opposed
Maliki’s bid for a second term as prime minister.
Not surprisingly, Nujeifi refused to resign, stating
that he would do so only in response to popular
demand or if dismissed by the provincial council.
Nothing would be remarkable in this round of totally
predictable reciprocal accusations—after all, nobody
wants to take responsibility for failure if he can
blame it on someone else. Yet in the context of Iraq
and even more broadly of the Arab world, with its
highly centralized political systems, the exchange
indicated something remarkable: a real degree of
decentralization, with provincial governments having
their own power bases and thus some independence.
There was politics both at the center and in the
provinces.
It was far less clear, however, whether
decentralization was also achieving what
decentralization is supposed to produce in
theory—namely, governance that is responsive to
citizens’ demands. Governors and provincial councils
have demonstrated clearly that while they will
jealously protect their power and autonomy, they
have yet to show a commitment to effective
governance.
Part of the shift in center-periphery relations was
the renewal of the discussion about forming new
self-governing regions like Kurdistan. In early
March, twelve of the 28 members of the Najaf
provincial council signed a petition demanding the
transformation of Najaf from a province into a
region similar to Kurdistan. The petition was
particularly significant because the signatories
belonged to different parties, including the Sadrist
Trend, State of Law, Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq
(ISCI), and former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s
Reform Party—all Shi’i parties, to be sure, but
Najaf is a heavily Shi’i province.
The Iraqi constitution recognizes the right of
provinces—individually or as part of a group—to
demand recognition as regions, allowing them to
enjoy the autonomy and self-government that is
present now only in Kurdistan. If at least one-third
of a provincial council’s members demand the
formation of a new region, the government is obliged
to consider it. No such petition had been submitted
until the Najaf initiative; an early discussion
about the possibility of forming a mega-region
comprising nine predominantly Shi’a provinces in the
south and center of the country was quickly
abandoned. Proponents of a Najaf region claimed that
they wanted Najaf to be recognized as a region
because they believed it would bring larger
financial transfers from the central government to
Najaf. Protesters saw this as a political maneuver
to avoid responding to their demands and angrily
rejected the idea.
Rethinking Alliances
Probably the most important effect of the protests
to date has been the shaking up of Iraq’s governing
coalition. The government set up in December 2010
after nine months of wrangling following the March 7
parliamentary elections was, from the outset, based
on a fragile grand alliance of parties brought
together not by a common ideology or a common
governing program, but by expediency. Neither Maliki
nor Iraqiya leader Iyad Allawi had been able to
forge an alliance that provided the required
majority of parliamentary seats but excluded their
rival. Shi’a parties that had initially rejected
Maliki’s bid to remain as prime
minister—particularly ISCI and the Sadrist Trend—had
not been able to coalesce around an alternative
candidate. All parties were thus forced to come
together, but they did so without much enthusiasm or
conviction.
By the time the protests started, government
formation was still incomplete. Many cabinet posts
were occupied by caretaker ministers because the
parties had been unable to agree on specific
nominees. Most important, Maliki was personally
acting as minister of defense, interior, and
national security, and he appeared to be in no hurry
to cede the posts to permanent appointees. While
sources close to the prime minister indicated that
the delays were due to the lack of a consensus on
the candidates by the various coalitions, Maliki was
more blunt, stating that he did not see a consensus
developing. And the National Council for Higher
Strategic Policies, a mechanism that Maliki had
agreed to form as a means to bring a reluctant
Allawi into the government, had not yet been set up
because there was no agreement about its role.
Allawi, slated to head the council, argued that it
must be a powerful executive body that could curb
the prime minister’s power, but Maliki insisted it
would simply be an advisory council. As a result,
legislation languished in the Council of
Representatives.
Once the protests started, the rival parties in the
governing coalition became more interested in
accusing each other of having caused the problems
than in working together to find a solution. Most
Iraqi politicians probably did not want to see the
government fall, but their attempts to deflect the
public’s anger from their party by pinning it on
another one undermined the government.
Moqtada al-Sadr was the first important figure to
distance himself from the government, declaring on
February 14 that Iraqis had the right to demonstrate
for better services and against the occupation. The
Sadrists were in a difficult position: Having
chosen, in the hope of gaining popularity, to
control ministries that delivered services to the
public, they now risked losing support if blame for
poor performance was directed at them.
Criticized by Maliki and others in the State of Law
coalition for attacking a government of which he was
a part, Sadr did not desist. He announced that his
party planned a referendum of sorts on people’s
views of the state of services in the country, but
he also pleaded with the protesters to give the
government six months to address their grievances.
If the government did not perform, Sadr said, he
would fully support the protesters.
Not surprisingly, when the survey results were
published in mid-March, they indicated that the vast
majority of the 3.8 million Iraqis from across the
country who allegedly participated agreed that
services were in bad shape and that they would
support protests if services did not improve in six
months. Less flamboyantly, the ISCI and its leader,
Ammar al-Hakim, also criticized the government’s
handling of the protests and expressed support for
the protesters’ demands.
After the February 25 protests and the crackdown by
security forces across the country, other members of
the National Alliance—the coalition of Shi’i parties
that Maliki had succeeded in cobbling together
through months of efforts—tried to distance
themselves from it without causing a complete break.
Allawi announced that he was giving up the
leadership of the still-to-be formed Strategic
Council (effectively ending his cooperation with
Maliki) and traveled to Najaf to meet with Sadr. The
Iraqiya spokesman announced that the organization
was beginning to coordinate with the Sadrist Trend.
Desertions also took place inside Maliki’s own State
of Law alliance. Safiya Suheil, one of the few women
in the organization, resigned shortly after the
protests began and declared her independence. And
Jaafar Baqir al-Sadr, a son of the late Grand
Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, resigned from the
Council of Representatives. Jaafar al-Sadr had run
for parliament as an independent on the State of Law
slate and received the second-largest number of
votes in Baghdad. He quit the parliament on February
17, claiming that a few individuals were
monopolizing decision making in the State of Law
coalition, that the parliament was ineffective
because of sectarianism, and that neither the
parliament nor the government could devise policies
or had a vision for the future.
Adding to Maliki’s woes, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
openly backed the protesters. He sent a personal
representative to participate in the February 25 day
of rage and subsequently praised the participants
for peacefully asking for their rights. The highly
revered religious leader also called for concrete
reforms, warning of dangerous ramifications if the
government continued down its current path.
At the time of this writing in mid-March, it was
still too early to judge whether the cracks
appearing in the governing alliance would widen to
the point of causing a collapse. Certainly, tensions
were increasing: the distrust of Maliki that delayed
for months the formation of the National Alliance
had resurfaced; Allawi was sulking; and factions
were emerging in Iraqiya. But no party was confident
that it would be any more possible to form an
alternative governing coalition today than it was in
the past. All factions were testing how far they
could push each other without provoking a break and
causing the government to fall.
Protests in Kurdistan
Kurdistan has also been shaken by protests initially
triggered by a combination of domestic grievances
and the so-called demonstration effect of events in
Tunisia and Egypt. But the separation between
Kurdistan and the rest of the country is so wide
that there were no linkages between protesters in
the two areas. Protestors in Kurdistan followed
their own path as popular discontent about
corruption and other problems was superseded by the
rivalries among Kurdish parties and blunted by a
nationalist appeal by the leadership trying to
deflect the protest away from itself.
Kurdistan has long been dominated by two political
parties, representing two political families and two
different sub-regions. The largest party—the
Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP—is linked to the
Barzani family. It controls the presidency of the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and alternates
with the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK,
in naming the KRG’s prime minister. The PUK, linked
to the Talabani family, is dominant in Sulaimaniyah;
it also controls the presidency of Iraq, and,
currently,www.ekurd.netthe
position of prime minister of the KRG. Since 2009,
the PUK has been losing support to a new party,
Gorran (Movement for Change), which was founded by
former PUK member Nawshirwan Mustafa. The protests
became part of the partisan politics of the regions
and the competition among its major political
parties.
Unrest started in Sulaimaniyah on February 17. The
demonstration was called ostensibly as a show of
solidarity with the youth of Tunisia and Egypt, but
before long the protesters started marching to KDP
headquarters, calling for reform and reportedly
chanting that “the corrupt must face justice.” It is
unclear who took the initiative but it was Gorran,
the upstart party, which took the blame for the
anti-KDP demonstrations—although it denied playing
any role.
Presumably in response to the protests, Gorran’s
headquarters in Irbil were set on fire, as were the
headquarters of KNN, a television station owned by
Gorran’s leader Mustafa. At the same time, units of
the peshmerga, Kurdistan’s defense force, were moved
from Erbil to Sulaimaniyah to avert any possible
escalation. The next day, Gorran offices in another
northern city, Duhok, were looted. Journalists
sympathetic to the protesters or linked to Mustafa’s
media company, Wusha, were also subject to attacks
and harassment. Small-scale protests also took place
in a few other towns but quickly died down.
The KDP and PUK tried initially to handle the
protests as a security issue. Without naming any
organization, they claimed that the protests had
been planned deliberately to destabilize Kurdistan.
But when protesters started calling for the
resignation of Kurdistan Prime Minister Barham Salih,
a PUK member, the two parties changed tactics.
Betraying how worried it was about the unrest, the
PUK leadership announced that it supported holding
early elections and forming an enlarged government,
presumably with Gorran’s participation. KRG
officials also set up a special committee to study
the demands of the protesters and opposition in
order to address the problems.
The promises did not mollify the opposition,
however. On March 3, Gorran and two smaller
opposition parties boycotted the session of the
Kurdish parliament. Clearly alarmed, Kurdistan
President Massoud Barzani immediately called for a
dialogue with the opposition to devise a reform
program. Most recently, he said he would step down
if the reform program failed, though his pledge was
made only after the nine Kurdish parties—including
PUK, KDP, and Gorran—signed an agreement not to
mobilize the street against each other.
Barzani also called for early elections, denying
that he intended to remain as president for life.
Prime Minister Salih, a fairly reform-minded member
of the PUK, then expressed his willingness to step
down if the parliament called on him to do
so—probably an empty gesture because the parliament
is dominated by the KDP and PUK and thus unlikely to
ask for his resignation. Taking advantage of the
major parties’ moment of weakness, Gorran continued
to push for faster change, rejecting the president’s
promises as insufficient and calling for the
government to step down without waiting for new
elections.
The Kurdish leadership also played another card to
end the political crisis: it sought to unite all
Kurds around an issue on which they agreed—the
annexation of the disputed town of Kirkuk. On
February 27, Barzani ordered two peshmerga units to
deploy around Kirkuk, claiming that terrorists had
infiltrated the city to organize protests and that
the deployment of the peshmerga was necessary to
protect residents. Despite calls by Maliki, Arab and
Turkoman residents, and even by the United States to
demobilize, the KRG refused to withdraw the
peshmerga—former KRG prime minister Nechirvan
Barzani even threatened to deploy more troops if the
situation did not improve. In a totally unexpected
move that called into question his allegiance to
Iraq as a whole, Talabani on March 8 declared that
Kirkuk was “Kurdistan’s Jerusalem” and called for a
Kurdish-Turkmen strategic alliance against the
“terrorists and new occupiers” of Kirkuk.
By creating a crisis in Kirkuk, the KDP and the PUK
may have succeeded in silencing the Kurdish
opposition, which cannot be seen as lukewarm on the
issue of Kirkuk. They have also succeeded in
reviving the issue of the implementation of Article
140 of the Iraqi constitution, which calls for a
referendum in which the residents of Kirkuk will
decide whether they want the city to become part of
Kurdistan. While beneficial in the short run to the
dominant Kurdish parties in their attempt to silence
the opposition, in the long run the crisis could
dearly cost Iraq as a whole by renewing tensions
that threaten the country’s unity.
Already changes in Kirkuk’s political makeup are
occurring as Governor Abdul Rahman Mustafa and
Rezkar Ali, the head of the provincial council of
Kirkuk, announced their resignations on March 15 for
personal reasons. In reality, the resignations were
the result of a political agreement between the
Kurdistan Alliance and the Turkoman Front, which
will now probably head the provincial council. This
may be the beginning of the strategic alliance
Talabani called for, and will put greater pressure
on Maliki to implement Article 140.
Conclusion
The success of protest movements in Tunisia and
Egypt in overthrowing two unpopular presidents and
launching a process of political transitions has
created expectations that other Arab countries would
go down the same path. Conversely, when the
governments of Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain employed
force to suppress uprisings and re-establish
control, many observers jumped to the conclusion
that the Arab spring was over. Iraq and Kurdistan
suggest a different conclusion, namely that protests
in each country follow different dynamics, dictated
by that country’s specific political situation.
Undoubtedly, similar conditions exist in Arab
countries that foment protest, and a demonstration
effect encourages citizens of one country to follow
the example of those in another country. All Arab
countries are experiencing a youth bulge; all,
including the wealthier ones, have high unemployment
rates, particularly among the young. And everywhere,
regimes—even those that respect at least some of the
forms of democracy—are authoritarian and
unresponsive to their citizens. But even if similar
factors spark protest, what happens next is driven
by different political circumstances.
In Iraq, popular protest has been quite
limited—although persistent—bringing into the
streets crowds that rarely exceeded more than a few
hundred people. In a country with an authoritarian,
monolithic regime, such protests would have hardly
mattered. They probably would have been swiftly
dispersed by the authorities, without political
consequences. Only much larger protests would have
persuaded the government to make concessions.
But Iraq has a different kind of political system.
While Maliki has displayed clear and worrisome
authoritarian tendencies, he does not preside over a
monolithic regime. The governing coalition is
divided and, hence, is internally vulnerable.
Furthermore, separate centers of power exist at the
provincial level. The system is not democratic, but
it is pluralistic. As a result, protests that would
have had few, if any, repercussions in more
monolithic political systems shook the governing
alliance in Iraq and affected the relationship
between the central government and the provinces.
This outcome is not necessarily positive for
citizens who want the government to address their
problems. The protests, in fact, had the opposite
effect: reigniting a political competition devoid of
policy content, thus keeping the authorities from
addressing the country’s concrete problems.
In Kurdistan, popular protest was quickly hijacked,
under circumstances that are unclear, by the
political parties. Protests thus became a tool that
the ruling parties in Kurdistan tried to use against
the opposition. When that maneuver failed, the
Kurdistan government managed to overwhelm the
protests in a wave of Kurdish nationalism. That
succeeded in uniting the Kurds but dividing
Iraq—with the risk of igniting serious conflict.
The story of popular protest is still unfolding in
both Iraq and in Kurdistan. It would be unwise to
predict the outcome, but it seems safe to conclude
that the political circumstances in both regions
will preclude either the Tunisia/Egypt scenario or
the Yemen/Libya/Bahrain scenario from unfolding. In
the end, the outcome will be determined by the
political dynamics in Iraq and Kurdistan.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Copyright ©, respective
author or news agency,
carnegieendowment.org
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