Whither Iraq (Redux)?
By Kanan Makiya
This is a (slightly adapted) version of a lecture Kanan Makiya gave last week at the University of New Hampshire. Makiya contrasts the relative progress made by Iraq’s victims-become-citizens with the dithering (and worse) of the country’s political class. His unillusioned, yet undespairing analysis clarifies the situation on the ground. It also hints why Makiya himself may one day be remembered – against all odds - as the intellectual father of the democracy struggling to be born in Iraq. The following passage gets right to the heart of the matter:
Both of Iraq’s national elections in 2005 and 2010 were in the end about that most fundamental of all political questions: “Who am I?” And how could it be otherwise in the new post-Saddam world that had so suddenly thrust itself upon the people of Iraq. Having been subjected to the gravest of depredations, and scarred by a brutal dictatorship unmatched in its capacity for cruelty, the Iraqi people entered political life in 2003, thanks to the United States and its allies, as an unknown quantity, unknown even to themselves.To be sure the men and women who took their lives in their hands as they went out to vote in 2005, when quite literally they were being targeted by al-Qaeda as they lined up at polling places, were heroes. They were heroes in a way that it is difficult for outsiders who have not been subjected to such sustained decades-long abuse and intimidation to understand. But they were also victims, and they carried the scars of that victim-hood in their hearts and minds; victim-hood is not something that can be erased overnight. And, in spite of what so much of Arab political culture has been trying to persuade us of in recent years - and not only Arab culture - it has to be emphasized there is no virtue in victim-hood; it is a terrible affliction, not a moral quality. It degrades us as citizens and as human beings. And so the question arises: How did these victims-become-citizens handle themselves in the two elections under consideration?
Here's Makiya’s answer to that question in full.
When I was first approached to give this talk on Iraq, I thought that the current political quagmire in Iraq would be over by the time of this lecture. We could then have talked about the new government and the likely direction it might take Iraq. However, Iraq has gone on to establish a new world record in the length of time between a general election and the formation of a government on the basis of that election. The vote I remind you was on March 7 of this year, that is more than 8 months ago, and still there is no prospect of a new government. The rumor mill that Iraq watchers like myself follow closely is weekly, sometimes even daily, stoked with new phenomenal twists and turns. Not to worry, I will not be boring you to tears by tracking all that or trying to anticipate the next big move.
I should make it clear, right at the outset, that even at this late stage, eight months after the people of Iraq went to the polls, this speaker has no idea who is going to form the next government. You can ask me about it in the question and answer period and I can reflect upon the possible outcomes of the games being played out by Iraqi politicians, but I cannot speak about certainties or even likelihoods. No one can. Remarkably, eight months after 19 million people went to the polls, the situation remains very fluid and unpredictable.
Today, instead, I will look at the 2010 election itself, and consider what it tells us about underlying trends in Iraq today, trends that the politicians in Baghdad seem to be unable to transmute into a new government. I’ll conclude by considering how we might be able to understand the ongoing inability – perhaps we could even call it the disability – displayed since the election by the Iraqi political class that was empowered by the US-led overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.
Unlike the wrangling going on in Baghdad today, which takes place behind closed doors, the March 2010 election took place in the full light of day, as did the only other national election in recent Iraqi history, that of December 2005. These are therefore two exceptionally clear benchmarks - watershed moments in the modern history of Iraq. They are worth looking at closely as a way of comprehending what has been happening in Iraq since the overthrow of the Ba’th regime of Saddam Husain in April of 2003.
I have three points to make that (I hope) will clarify the meaning - and relations between - these two national elections.
***
The first point is to observe that both elections were unquestionably genuine elections, contrary to the belief in so many Arab countries. Both elections had hundreds of participating parties, thousands of candidates (more than seven thousand in 2005 and just over six thousand in 2010), myriads of manifestoes, ever more colorful and compelling posters. Unsurprisingly, both elections were replete with the backstabbing and ad-hominem attacks by would-be politicians on one another, which is what one would expect from a real competitive contest in a country still rather new to the experience.
To be sure the Arab world had seen elections before the 2005 contest in Iraq. The vast majority of them, however, were artificial – top-down, state-run affairs whose outcomes were never in doubt. They were in the end anti-democratic exercises, celebrations of (one or another form of) autocracy, not a repudiation of it as happened in Iraq.
There was a very high 76.4% turnout in 2005 from among 15,568,702 eligible voters by comparison with a 62.4% turnout in 2010 from among 18,902,073 eligible voters in 2010. The decline in the participation rate is there between 2005 and 2010, but it is not very significant. Both elections were equally popular and raucous affairs. Keep also in mind that the Sunni Arab community, which had boycotted the 2005 elections, came out in force in 2010, and that has had a very important impact on the numbers and on how much more inclusive the 2010 elections were in comparison with their 2005 counterpart.
More importantly, perhaps, in the run-up to the Dec 2005 elections, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the chief of the al-Qaeda-led section of the insurgency, was mounting what looked back then like a credible threat to the fledgling state. Zarqawi had declared war against the post-Saddam would-be democracy and any Iraqi who dared to go out and vote in support of the overall political process unfolding in Iraq since the overthrow of the Ba’th.
By 2010, however, Zarqawi was dead and his war effectively over, his organization continues the violence, maintaining an ongoing capability to set off car bombs city-wide, and, like its counterpart in 2005, it seeks to derail the elections’ outcome. While the current wave of violence is horrific (killing up to 300 Iraqis a month in the run-up to March 2010), it’s important to keep in mind that level of violence is considerably below 2005-2007 levels (when perhaps as many as 1500 people were being killed a month).
This drop in the levels of violence is both a long-term side effect of the surge and a consequence of Iraqis turning actively against the insurgency and fighting it themselves. These two developments go hand in glove with one another and should not be separated as so often happens in media commentary on the subject. One should also not discount the fact there are today, unlike in 2005, close to a million Iraqi men under arms. The state may not yet have a monopoly on violence, but the government has an institutionalized military capability not seen since the height of the Iraq-Iran war - that is, since the worst years of the Saddam Hussein era. If those forces are at least in part the cause for al-Qaeda’s retreat in Iraq, they also, sadly, explain why there are secret prisons and why the practice of torture is making a comeback in Iraq.
The relative successes in the security domain of the various policing and army agencies of the new Iraqi state must be contrasted with the abysmal failure of all other state institutions to deliver services of any other kind to the Iraqi public - a failure that has been ongoing since the days of the American Occupation. Electricity blackouts, filthy cities, incompetent health and education administrations, and bridges to nowhere were a major gripes of the electorate during the election campaign. Though the focus switched toward the end of process when the de-Ba’thification Commission attempted to blacklist several hundred candidates in the run-up to the vote. One could therefore conclude that between 2005 and 2010 Iraq’s main problem has shifted from its violence to its politics, a good thing in general, but progress has its drawbacks as we can see from the impasse that has been going on in Baghdad in the last eight months.
***
The second point focuses on unanticipated positive consequences of the shift from violence to politics. Representation of women and minorities (including Christians) improved in 2010, and this in accordance with a complex formula worked out in the outgoing parliament beforehand. Moreover the quality of the women candidates in parliament now appears to be higher than in 2005, in part because women campaigned individually and on women’s issues. Women were not just stuck on a party list by male party bosses as happened in 2005. This time around they were voted in on their own terms as their own persons. Women (and minorities) seem likely to be better represented in the 2010 parliament, even if the state is unable, or has not always been willing, to protect them on the streets.
Underlying this positive change is the foundational fact that in 2010 an open list system was employed in which voters ended up choosing both a list and the individuals within that list. Thus we can for the first time in Iraqi politics judge the popularity of individual candidates, and that is a great step forward toward accountability and actual popular sovereignty. Though it does introduce another level of electoral unpredictability.
So, for instance, we know that Maliki got something like 622,000 individual votes in Baghdad (and no votes north of Baghdad) even though his list did not do as well as he had expected. While Allawi, head of the winning list, got 400,000 or so votes in Baghdad. These were the two highest vote getters in the country (out of 6,000 or so candidates as I mentioned). The ability of the electorate to pick and choose individuals and not just lists is one factor that made for the election of a higher quality of female candidates. these new representatives were out canvassing in neighborhoods and districts - making promises to their constituencies that they will now have to live up to. (Something that did not happen in 2005.)
On the other side of the ledger it must conceded that Sadrist candidates were able to exploit the open list system to win around 40 seats, producing an electoral bloc just under that of the Kurds in size. The Sadrists managed to do this because they, alone among the major parties, seem to have thought through the new system of voting for individuals, and carefully broke down the electorate of their main stronghold, Thawra city (now named Sadr city). Going precinct by precinct, they picked local candidates in each sector whom they knew would come close to the required threshold for a seat in parliament. And coming close was sometimes all that was necessary because the new election law mandated that the votes given to outright losers in the election had to be redistributed to those who had come near the required threshold first. Maliki and Hakim, by contrast, stuck with the old party boss method of appointing people to their lists based on backroom deals, with little reference to the local electorate. Voters, who had seen how shamelessly these hacks had behaved in the last parliament, kicked them out.
The new reality that Iraqi voters have the right to choose individual politicians - and not just blocs or lists of candidates – seems to portend the breakdown of the old political class that worked in parliament and government as advisors or ministers or chiefs of staff. We’re talking about the kinds of people who toadied up to Maliki and Hakim and Allawi in the run-up to the elections in order to get a seat in parliament. The new parliament is now made up of many new faces, the voters having ruled the old parliament and the functionaries of Maliki’s government as corrupt and unfit to return to office. Several ministers and former speakers of parliament, and even the head of the de-Ba’thification committee, Ali al-Lami - the man behind the April 27 attempt to disqualify 20 more members of Allawi’s list for supposedly being Ba’thists - got barely a few hundred votes and were thus eliminated (to many people’s surprise).
On the other hand, a Sadrist candidate, Hakim al-Zamili, a former deputy Minister of Health, who ran death squads during the 2006-2007 civil war, was able to work the new electoral system like a professional, as though he had been doing it all his life. This killer and mafia-style leader ended up with 30,080 votes, the seventh-largest number in Baghdad.
***
The third and final point I would like to make about the differences between 2005 and 2010 elections has to with the issue of what one might call identity politics in Iraq.
Both elections were in the end about that most fundamental of all political questions: “Who am I?” And how could it be otherwise in the new post-Saddam world that had so suddenly thrust itself upon the people of Iraq. Having been subjected to the gravest of depredations, and scarred by a brutal dictatorship unmatched in its capacity for cruelty, the Iraqi people entered political life in 2003, thanks to the United States and its allies, as an unknown quantity, unknown even to themselves.
To be sure the men and women who took their lives in their hands as they went out to vote in 2005, when quite literally they were being targeted by al-Qaeda as they lined up at polling places, were heroes. They were heroes in a way that it is difficult for outsiders who have not been subjected to such sustained decades-long abuse and intimidation to understand. But they were also victims, and they carried the scars of that victim-hood in their hearts and minds; victim-hood is not something that can be erased overnight. And, in spite of what so much of Arab political culture has been trying to persuade us of in recent years - and not only Arab culture - it has to be emphasized there is no virtue in victim-hood; it is a terrible affliction, not a moral quality. It degrades us as citizens and as human beings. And so the question arises: How did these victims-become-citizens handle themselves in the two elections under consideration?
A central feature of the 2005 election was that it followed a national referendum that ratified a permanent constitution for Iraq. The debate over the constitution preceding the referendum had revealed deep fissures within the Shiite coalition. The first test had come in March of 2004, during the debate over the interim constitution. A conflict erupted inside the then Governing Council, set up by the Occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), over how the final permanent constitution should be ratified. A rather abstract question (if you think about it) given the times. At issue was the all-important question of minority rights and federalism. Specifically, the most contentious item of the interim constitution was Article 61(c), which held that no future permanent constitution could be considered ratified if two-thirds of the voters in any three governorates rejected it. This ensured a kind of veto power to the Kurds, and the Sunni Arabs, each of whom had at least 3 governorates they could count themselves a majority in.
Article 61(c) embodied a crucial democratic principle previously accepted by the Iraqi opposition in exile; namely, that an Iraqi democracy had to be principally about minority rights, and only afterwards about majority rule. In other words, the rule of law was supposed to take precedence over majority sentiment. But some Shiite leaders had never really believed in minority rights. They assumed their envisioned numerical preponderance would give them the right to determine the shape and essence of the new country. In a foreshadowing of what would happen to the Shiite lists in the run-up to the 2010 elections, the 13 person Shiite majority block in the 25 person Governing Council, set in place by the CPA, fell apart as a voting block in 2004. Article 61(c) passed only because 5 out of the 13 Shiite members of the Governing Council voted along with the Kurds and the liberals and the Sunni members of the Council, refusing to fall in line with the other 8 Shiite members. This, as I said, was a harbinger of the inability of Iraq’s Shiites to hold together as a political block in an electoral contest.
It was an incident that indicated the idea of Iraq as a plural all-inclusive national enterprise could very well turn out to be at odds with the Shiite sense of political entitlement arising from their own (completely understandable) sense of victim-hood. And it was an incident also showed how hard it could be to hold any Shiite majority bloc together.
The insurgency and the Sunni boycott of the 2005 elections, along with an attendant amplification of Shi’i’s sense victim-hood, served to wipe out those early signs of Shi’i disunity. Ethnic and communal identity politics became the defining issue of the elections in December, 2005. Everyone voted according to whether they were a Kurd or a Shiite. And if they were Sunni Arabs, by and large, they did not vote. Insecurity and anxiety over the future, along with fear of the “other” had created, almost overnight after 2003, communities held together by the conviction that their security depended on sticking with their own, at the expense (it must be said) of a larger and more inclusive idea of “Iraq.”
That idea is one I had grown up with, as had my whole generation, and my parents’ generation. But this common vision of “Iraq” as a single political community came under heavy fire in 2005. The heaviest threat, though, did not come from the Arab nationalism of the Iraqi Ba’th, which had for 30 years subordinated Iraq to the mythology of a single supposedly yet-to-be-united Arab nation. The fire this time stemmed from a narrow, reflexive response to that totalizing ideology’s decades of assault on Iraqi society: the politics of victim-hood.
People, or citizens to be more accurate, become sectarian when they are afraid. They hunker down as a form of defense, and put citizenship in second place to more primal forms of identity like those based on blood relations, and sectarian or ethnic origin. Suddenly the only answer to the question “Who will protect me now?” becomes “My own kind. I cannot afford to trust anyone else.” This is the pattern that (for understandable reasons) defined the 2005 elections. After all, a sectarian civil war would soon blow up in 2006. What’s striking, though, is that this pattern did not hold true in 2010.
In 2010, Shiite unity fell apart long before the elections, and two major Shiite blocks or lists were formed instead of one. Neither list was endorsed by the most senior marj’i in the land, Ayatollah Sistani based in Najaf. And neither was able in the end to muster a “winning” majority of electoral seats. Identity politics began breaking down almost as soon as the security situation began to improve in 2008 and 2009.
The first of the two Shiite blocks, the State of Law Alliance, was headed by Maliki, the current Prime Minister, and won 89 out of a total of 325 seats; the second was the old rump of the Shiite Alliance headed by the Hakim family - the Iraqi National Alliance, which had won the 2005 elections but got only 65 seats, 40 of which, unexpectedly, went to the unpredictable Sadrists who pledge allegiance to the firebrand anti-American cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.
The dubious status of “winner” of the 2010 elections surprisingly went to Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiyya list, which got 91 seats (two seats more than Maliki’s list). Allawi’s performance is the biggest shock of these elections. Although nominally a Shiite, Allawi was a former Ba’thist who left the party in the early 1970s and was the target of a vicious assassination attempt in London by Ba’th agents in 1972. Allawi ended up getting the bulk of the Arab Sunni and secular Shi’i vote. He actually improved his standing in the south of the country, compared to 2005, if only by a handful of seats. You could say he got the entire non-Kurdish, anti-Iranian vote, as many of his supporters were moved by their fears of Iranian influence in Iraq. He most certainly did not get his seats because he was a former Ba’thist; he got them, it is important to say, because he was perceived as being genuinely non-sectarian, and that seems to have counted in the March 2010 elections.
• • •
So what stands out if we try to impartially assess Iraq’s general elections in Iraq since 2003.
Looked at objectively, Iraqi voters come out especially well in the 2010 election. But, unfortunately, their democratic impulse (and survivors’ instinct) must contend with a political class molded and shaped by sectarianism – a would-be establishment that has proven itself to be capable of whipping up ugliness whenever that seems to serve its interests, and one that’s profoundly corrupt to boot. This class, which has been in formation since 2003, is undemocratic in the sense that it is unable to make the compromises necessary to form a government. Since no single alliance came remotely close to an outright win in 2010, the politicos have taken to questioning seat numbers, blackmailing candidates with accusations of Ba’thism, bribing or pressuring the courts, demanding recounts. In spite of all this, it remains a fact that both Maliki and Allawi face an uphill battle to form a winning coalition. If Maliki ends up allying himself with the Iraqi National Alliance and its 65 seats - the most logical move for him - he still has to deal with the Sadrists within that Alliance, who hate him with a passion for having led the crackdown on them around the time of the surge. Shi’ite unity, it turns out, is a fiction that cannot be counted upon. On the other hand Allawi, if he wanted to join up with the Kurds, has to deal with the fact that some of his Sunni partners in the Iraqiyya Alliance are deeply resentful of what they see as undue Kurdish influence in Baghdad and the northern region. But, even if Maliki or Allawi were able to overcome these problems, neither would have the 163 members of parliament required by the constitution to form a government. Both men would still have to reach out to other allies, greatly complicating the negotiating process that is currently underway.
What’s even stranger is that Allawi and Maliki have far more in common with one another, ideologically speaking, than they do with some of the members of their own lists or their most likely allies in parliament. If they were able to work together, Iraq just might have a real national unity government up to the task of dealing with the huge questions that lie ahead. But that is unlikely to happen as both men have equally autocratic and arrogant temperaments and would find it very difficult to work with one another. It’s sad to say, but Egypt’s President Mubarak probably serves as a role model for both Maliki and Allawi.
As the wheeling and dealing and the parceling out of offices and ministries drags on, the danger is that the credibility of the whole process - the idea of elections as the best mechanism for changing governments - will be damaged. There is no greater contrast imaginable than that between the transparency of the election campaign and the secrecy of the talks and negotiations in which real power on the ground is being divided up in the post-election period. The Iraqi electorate is fully aware of this contrast, and is losing its faith in its politicians.
In closing I’d like to underscore that although Iraqi voters seem to have chosen to put identity politics on the back burner in 2010, their politicians have not. The Sectarian Way is almost certainly reasserting itself in the dark and shadowy world where the political elite is making its back-room deals, sharing out the various government ministries to various bidders among the parties and sects in return for votes needed to make up the magic 163. The next government of Iraq will eventually be formed on the basis of this sort of down-low (in all senses of the term) bargaining. But at a heavy price. The sectarian dynamics of government formation in Iraq (as that process has evolved since 2003) undermine the idea of government service as a calling informed by a disinterested commitment to the public welfare. The devaluation of public service - and citizenship itself – dates back to the Saddam era. But the devolution has reached new depths in the new Iraq, where increasingly the state and its institutions are run as fiefdoms to serve private interests and a local clientele of beneficiaries.
If that continues, the prospects are more than worrisome. “Local” politicos and the patronage networks that lie behind them must not be enabled to corrupt the state and trash the idea of national authority implicit in the very names of government ministries. Otherwise, Iraq’s elections will herald not the slow but steady engendering of a truly democratic polity but the legitimizing of new forms of privilege and prejudice.
From October, 2010
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/65
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Whither Iraq (Redux)?:
» fake ray bans from fake ray bans
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on June 6, 2013 02:48 PM
» cheap nike free run 3 from cheap nike free run 3
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on June 12, 2013 08:45 AM
» maillot de foot pas cher from maillot de foot pas cher
This is a really excellent post, I consider there will be several individuals. like it, of system, I was 1 of the men and women. I believe this report. increase my information. Thank you! [Read More]
Tracked on July 15, 2013 09:13 AM
» louis vuitton factory outlet store from louis vuitton factory outlet store
louis vuitton handbags uk outlet First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on August 26, 2013 02:39 AM
» louis vuitton handbags from louis vuitton handbags
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on December 23, 2013 12:50 PM
» louis vuitton handbags from louis vuitton handbags
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on December 23, 2013 12:52 PM
» グッチ レディース長財布 from グッチ レディース長財布
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on January 13, 2014 01:26 AM
» louis vuitton shoes from louis vuitton shoes
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on January 27, 2014 09:18 PM
» Louis Vuitton Outlet from Louis Vuitton Outlet
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on February 19, 2014 11:25 PM
» noah 2014 full movie from noah 2014 full movie
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on April 20, 2014 09:37 AM
» Make Him Desire You Review from Make Him Desire You Review
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on May 12, 2014 03:27 PM
» xe toyota camry 2015 from xe toyota camry 2015
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on October 11, 2014 11:26 PM
» xem xe fiat 2001 from xem xe fiat 2001
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on October 14, 2014 04:43 PM
» アグブーツ from アグブーツ
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on October 19, 2014 06:13 AM
» foulard hermes 75007 from foulard hermes 75007
Where: 1 Public Square NashvilleTchaikovsky's score for The Nutcracker is a favorite holiday tradition for lots of people and the Nashville Ballet has been performing the ballet in Nashville for many years. In 2008 they began production of Nashville's ... [Read More]
Tracked on October 29, 2014 01:46 PM
» http://www.mindwaveanalytics.com/fashion/Multi-colored-coach-handbag.html from http://www.mindwaveanalytics.com/fashion/Multi-colored-coach-handbag.html
First of the Month [Read More]
Tracked on January 16, 2015 05:05 AM