Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
October 2, 2008
Pg. 5
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD — The dust storms that have blanketed Baghdad, making it hard to see for much of the summer, seem a metaphor for the times.
The security situation is indisputably good. Violence is down. Parliament passed both a law to hold a census for the first time in more than three decades and a provincial election law that would allow the balloting to be held in all but one province by the end of January. This is clear progress.
But look harder at this moment — even at the passage of the election law — and it is possible to make out paths leading either to failure or to success.
From the American standpoint, elections are a good thing, a chance to sort out the division of power peacefully. Elections would allow a number of groups now excluded from the political mix to have a place at the table. Chief among them are representatives of tribal Sunnis and impoverished Shiites.
But that in turn means that groups currently in power would likely lose ground. And in Iraq, a country that has settled its differences more often with guns than words, people are used to fighting to keep their power, not using the art of persuasion.
Saddam Hussein famously executed potential rivals after a 1979 meeting of the Baath Party. Earlier in Iraq’s 20th century history, at least four successive coups deposed one leader after another; the new leader would use executions and arrests to suppress any opposition.
The favored American democratic model — majority rule balanced by minority rights and the rule of law — keeps running afoul of Iraqi realities. The underlying problem is that there has yet to be an overall political deal, acceptable to all sides, that distributes power among Iraq’s competing interests. Although it is rarely talked about in bald terms, there are scores to settle here.
“From now on violence will follow the politics,” said a senior Western official who is following the pre-election maneuvering.
Look north, south and west of Baghdad and potentially lethal rivalries threaten to play out in the near term as elections approach but also after they are over, when there are new winners and losers. Elections heighten the likelihood of increased numbers of assassination attempts, arrests of those viewed as “enemies” of the central or local government and intimidation of political rivals who threaten the status quo.
While overall violence against civilians is down, members of some political factions, from those affiliated with the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to the Sunni-dominated Awakening Councils, can tick off lists of people they believe were killed for political reasons. American military leaders disagree among themselves about whether the assassinations are increasing or whether some of the killings are merely criminal acts. But they are “watching the numbers closely,” said a military official who attends briefings on attacks.
Look north and the Kurds are battling for hegemony in areas that lie along the border of their semiautonomous region. They are competing with Turkmens and Sunni Arabs who claim primacy of ownership to some of the same territory, particularly the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding province. Politicians have tried repeatedly since 2003 to reach a deal to resolve the disputes. But each effort has foundered on Kurdish ambitions to expand the Kurdistan region.
For much of the past five years the situation was tense but did not explode into ethnic violence. That changed in the last six months as attacks began on the party headquarters of different groups. Then in August, Kurdish soldiers in Kirkuk opened fire on Turkmens after a suicide bomb; the ensuing riot killed dozens of people. The violence spread. In early September in Khanaqin, a predominantly Kurdish city that lies in neighboring Diyala Province, Iraqi Army tanks faced off against Kurdish pesh merga, the Kurdistan security forces.
In the Shiite south of the country there is a struggle for power between the main parties: the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Dawa Party, led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The two, previously partners in the government, are now fighting over turf, jobs and a vision for the country.
Mr. Maliki’s party holds the levers of power in Baghdad and is eager to expand its power and influence over jobs at the provincial level by gaining control of matters like the hiring and firing of local police chiefs. The Supreme Council, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has long wanted a more federalist model with much of the power in the hands of local governors and councils. The Supreme Council controls at least four southern provinces and also is powerful in Baghdad.
“The central government is being extended at the expense of the local government in the provinces, and we think that’s illegal,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a member of Parliament from the Supreme Council and head of the Badr Organization, its onetime armed wing. “We have a federal government with local government in the regions, and there is restricted authority for the central government; for instance, they want to appoint and remove police commanders,” he said.
For Badr, which has made a point of installing police commanders in several key provinces, such government involvement would mean the Supreme Council would lose sole control over police and related security force jobs. This could turn out to be just bickering between political parties, but it could also balloon into something lethal.
Recently Mr. Maliki’s party, which has the support of the army but no militia of its own, has again been reaching out to Shiites aligned with Mr. Sadr, the anti-American cleric, some of whose followers are armed. The Supreme Council is similarly able to muster gunmen; some members are in the police or the army. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that assassinations already have become quite common in several southern provinces; most notably in Hilla, in Babil Province, many Sadrists have been detained or killed outright.
In Anbar Province, which encompasses a large swath of western Iraq, an intra-Sunni dynamic is playing out in which the Iraqi Islamic Party, which now holds power in the provincial council, is worried that the Awakening Councils, backed by the American military, will oust them. The Awakening Councils, which are credited with helping to oust Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from large areas of western and north-central Iraq as well as Baghdad, believe it is time for them to wield power in politics as they do on the ground.
Since a number of the councils’ members had been insurgents or supportive of the insurgency, however, the government is suspicious of them.
In the past several months the Iraqi Army has begun to arrest some of the leaders, especially in Anbar. The moves have been greeted with only weak protests from the Sunni parties that now hold power since the arrests weaken their political competition. But Awakening members are armed and unlikely to tolerate efforts to muzzle them.
That is truer now than ever with the American military clearly on course to withdraw first from Iraqi streets and then from the country.
The future is up for grabs.
October 2, 2008
Pg. 5
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD — The dust storms that have blanketed Baghdad, making it hard to see for much of the summer, seem a metaphor for the times.
The security situation is indisputably good. Violence is down. Parliament passed both a law to hold a census for the first time in more than three decades and a provincial election law that would allow the balloting to be held in all but one province by the end of January. This is clear progress.
But look harder at this moment — even at the passage of the election law — and it is possible to make out paths leading either to failure or to success.
From the American standpoint, elections are a good thing, a chance to sort out the division of power peacefully. Elections would allow a number of groups now excluded from the political mix to have a place at the table. Chief among them are representatives of tribal Sunnis and impoverished Shiites.
But that in turn means that groups currently in power would likely lose ground. And in Iraq, a country that has settled its differences more often with guns than words, people are used to fighting to keep their power, not using the art of persuasion.
Saddam Hussein famously executed potential rivals after a 1979 meeting of the Baath Party. Earlier in Iraq’s 20th century history, at least four successive coups deposed one leader after another; the new leader would use executions and arrests to suppress any opposition.
The favored American democratic model — majority rule balanced by minority rights and the rule of law — keeps running afoul of Iraqi realities. The underlying problem is that there has yet to be an overall political deal, acceptable to all sides, that distributes power among Iraq’s competing interests. Although it is rarely talked about in bald terms, there are scores to settle here.
“From now on violence will follow the politics,” said a senior Western official who is following the pre-election maneuvering.
Look north, south and west of Baghdad and potentially lethal rivalries threaten to play out in the near term as elections approach but also after they are over, when there are new winners and losers. Elections heighten the likelihood of increased numbers of assassination attempts, arrests of those viewed as “enemies” of the central or local government and intimidation of political rivals who threaten the status quo.
While overall violence against civilians is down, members of some political factions, from those affiliated with the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to the Sunni-dominated Awakening Councils, can tick off lists of people they believe were killed for political reasons. American military leaders disagree among themselves about whether the assassinations are increasing or whether some of the killings are merely criminal acts. But they are “watching the numbers closely,” said a military official who attends briefings on attacks.
Look north and the Kurds are battling for hegemony in areas that lie along the border of their semiautonomous region. They are competing with Turkmens and Sunni Arabs who claim primacy of ownership to some of the same territory, particularly the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding province. Politicians have tried repeatedly since 2003 to reach a deal to resolve the disputes. But each effort has foundered on Kurdish ambitions to expand the Kurdistan region.
For much of the past five years the situation was tense but did not explode into ethnic violence. That changed in the last six months as attacks began on the party headquarters of different groups. Then in August, Kurdish soldiers in Kirkuk opened fire on Turkmens after a suicide bomb; the ensuing riot killed dozens of people. The violence spread. In early September in Khanaqin, a predominantly Kurdish city that lies in neighboring Diyala Province, Iraqi Army tanks faced off against Kurdish pesh merga, the Kurdistan security forces.
In the Shiite south of the country there is a struggle for power between the main parties: the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Dawa Party, led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The two, previously partners in the government, are now fighting over turf, jobs and a vision for the country.
Mr. Maliki’s party holds the levers of power in Baghdad and is eager to expand its power and influence over jobs at the provincial level by gaining control of matters like the hiring and firing of local police chiefs. The Supreme Council, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has long wanted a more federalist model with much of the power in the hands of local governors and councils. The Supreme Council controls at least four southern provinces and also is powerful in Baghdad.
“The central government is being extended at the expense of the local government in the provinces, and we think that’s illegal,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a member of Parliament from the Supreme Council and head of the Badr Organization, its onetime armed wing. “We have a federal government with local government in the regions, and there is restricted authority for the central government; for instance, they want to appoint and remove police commanders,” he said.
For Badr, which has made a point of installing police commanders in several key provinces, such government involvement would mean the Supreme Council would lose sole control over police and related security force jobs. This could turn out to be just bickering between political parties, but it could also balloon into something lethal.
Recently Mr. Maliki’s party, which has the support of the army but no militia of its own, has again been reaching out to Shiites aligned with Mr. Sadr, the anti-American cleric, some of whose followers are armed. The Supreme Council is similarly able to muster gunmen; some members are in the police or the army. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that assassinations already have become quite common in several southern provinces; most notably in Hilla, in Babil Province, many Sadrists have been detained or killed outright.
In Anbar Province, which encompasses a large swath of western Iraq, an intra-Sunni dynamic is playing out in which the Iraqi Islamic Party, which now holds power in the provincial council, is worried that the Awakening Councils, backed by the American military, will oust them. The Awakening Councils, which are credited with helping to oust Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from large areas of western and north-central Iraq as well as Baghdad, believe it is time for them to wield power in politics as they do on the ground.
Since a number of the councils’ members had been insurgents or supportive of the insurgency, however, the government is suspicious of them.
In the past several months the Iraqi Army has begun to arrest some of the leaders, especially in Anbar. The moves have been greeted with only weak protests from the Sunni parties that now hold power since the arrests weaken their political competition. But Awakening members are armed and unlikely to tolerate efforts to muzzle them.
That is truer now than ever with the American military clearly on course to withdraw first from Iraqi streets and then from the country.
The future is up for grabs.