Cole Has More on Iraq

Flames engulf a car following a car bomb blast Friday in Baghdad, left; and residents of Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City wave posters of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Monday.
Juan Cole has more great articles today. Check out his Iraqi election update here. Salon has published a post Iraq article on the rise of Shiite power in Iraq here. This is an outstanding article with background information on the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, their political objectives and some predictions of the future political course.
Here is an exerpt from Informed Comment:

Az-Zaman reports that 150,000 angry Iraqi Christians in Ninevah Province came out to protest on Monday. The ballot boxes arrived in their areas too late on Sunday, and they say they were promised that they could vote until 10 am Monday to give them time to cast the ballots. In the end, however, the Electoral Commission declined to make an exception for them, and they just won't get to vote. Iraqi Christians have been the victims of terrorist attacks, many have emigrated, and many fear Kurdish control over their regions.
Turkmen and other groups in Mosul
also bitterly complained that often ballot boxes did not arrive in time, or at all, depriving thousands of the franchise.
I suggested on the Lehrer News Hour on Monday that now would be a good time for the Coalition forces to simply withdraw from Basra province. There don't seem to me to be the kind of violent incidents in Basra that require the British presence. Surely the Iraqi forces could deal with it, especially since the Shiites of the south are likely to be loyal to an elected government blessed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. If foreign troops were removed from Basra, it would be an important step toward full resumption of sovereignty by Iraq.

My article on Iraqi politics after the elections, "The Shiite Earthquake", is up at Salon.com.

Radical Islamist violence is spilling over into Kuwait. This is a worrisome development. There are rumors that the guerrillas in Iraq are selling their munitions abroad, and one wonders if the turmoil in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq is beginning to spill over onto neighbors.

More comments on the election by me in an interview with David Crumm of the Detroit Free Press.
Speaking of various media, gluttons for punishment
can find my recent appearance on C-Span here on the Web.

Apparently I even have views on Squarepants Spongebob, who I am sure is straight.

Complete Article

Flames engulf a car following
a car bomb blast Friday in Baghdad, left; and residents of Baghdad's Shiite
enclave of Sadr City wave posters of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Monday.

The Shiite Earthquake
With non-Sunni Muslims poised to take power for the first time, a
new Iraq is being born. Will it survive its infancy?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juan Cole

Feb. 1, 2005  | 
The elections held on Jan. 30 in Iraq were
deeply flawed as a democratic process, but they represent a political earthquake
in Iraq and in the Middle East. The old Shiite seminary city of Najaf, south of
Baghdad, appears poised to emerge as Iraq's second capital. For the first time
in the Arab Middle East, a Shiite majority has come to power. A Shiite-dominated
Parliament in Iraq challenges the implicit Sunni biases of Arab nationalism as
it was formulated in Cairo and Algiers. And it will force Iraqis to deal
straightforwardly with the multicultural character of their national society,
something the pan-Arab Baath Party either papered over or actively attempted to
erase. The road ahead is extremely dangerous: Overreaching or miscalculation by
any of the involved parties could lead to a crisis, even to civil war. And
America's role in the new Iraq is uncertain.

Despite the loftiness of the political rhetoric
and the courage and idealism of ordinary voters, the process was so marred by
irregularities as sometimes to border on the absurd. The party lists were
announced, but the actual candidates running on these lists had to remain
anonymous because of security concerns. Known candidates received death threats
and some assassination attempts were reported. So the voters selected lists by
vague criteria such as their top leaders, who were known to the public, or
general political orientation.

Late in the election season, several politicians
discovered that they had been listed without their permission and angrily
demanded that the lists withdraw their names. So not only were the candidates
mostly anonymous, but some persons were running without knowing it. These
irregularities made the process less like an election (where there is lively
campaigning by known candidates and issues can be debated in public) and more
like a referendum among shadowy party lists.

Nevertheless, enough was known about the major
party and coalition lists to allow most Iraqis to make a decision. The United
Iraqi Alliance was one of six major coalitions, grouping the most important of
the Shiite religious parties. Shiites, although they constitute a majority of
Iraqis, had never before had the prospect of real political power. Formed under
the auspices of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who appointed a six-man
negotiating committee in an attempt to unite the Shiite vote, the UIA used the
ayatollah's image relentlessly in its campaign advertising. Religious Shiites
got the word to vote for "No. 169," the number given the UIA on the ballot, and
were carefully informed that it was represented by the symbol for a candle. Its
constituent parties, such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI) and the Dawa Party, had in the past struggled to create an Islamic
republic under Saddam's harsh repression. Most of them were more used to the
technique of the clandestine cell and the paramilitary strike than to the
hurly-burly of public campaigning.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, an old asset
of the American Central Intelligence Agency, led a list of ex-Baathists and
secularists, both Shiite and Sunni. For those Iraqis who yearned for a strongman
and valued law and order, Allawi's list had a certain appeal. In the north, the
Kurdish parties formed a coalition that would attract virtually all of the
Kurdish votes (they form about 15 percent of the Iraqi population). The Sunni
Arab interim president, Ghazi al-Yawir, also formed a list, the "Iraqis," which
had a decidedly secular cast.

The turnout for the elections was higher than had
been predicted by the Iraqi Electoral Commission, which had suggested that about
half of the eligible voters, or 6 to 7 million, would come out. By the Monday
after the Jan. 30 elections, the commission was estimating that about 8 million,
or 57 percent of the eligible voters, had cast ballots. This estimate was not
founded on any exact statistics, which had to await the counting of the ballots,
but appears to have been little more than a guess. The commission's earliest
guess was 72 percent, a clear error. In any case, it seems clear that Kurds and
Shiites came out in great numbers, and both will do well in Parliament.

As expected, voting was extremely light in the
Sunni Arab areas. In Babil province, the trouble spots of Latifiyah and
Mahmudiyah avoided violence, but few voters ventured out. The Arabs of Kirkuk,
angry about a ruling allowing Kurds who used to reside in the city to vote in
local elections, for the most part boycotted the process. In Mosul, the Arab
quarters in the west saw firefights, though Kurds and Turkmens came out
to vote in the eastern parts of the city. The four polling stations in Baghdad's
Sunni Adhamiyah district did not even bother to open. Polling stations in
Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Beiji were reported to be largely empty all day. In
the sizable city of Ramadi, only 300 ballots were cast.

The Sunni Arabs of Samarra, a city of some
200,000, cast only 1,400 ballots. The U.S. military had conducted operations in
Samarra in October as a prelude for its November campaign against Fallujah,
insisting that these military actions would prepare the way for successful
elections in these cities. Most of Fallujah was in refugee camps by the time of
the elections, and a sullen and angry Sunni Arab population largely rejected the
polls as illegitimate because they were conducted under foreign military
occupation. The threats brandished by the remnants of the Baath military, which
is waging a guerrilla war against the United States and the new order, also took
their toll.

The guerrilla war being waged by some Sunni Arabs
will not end with the elections. Their leadership is committed to destabilizing
the country, pushing the Americans back out, and mounting yet another coup. The
resistance consists largely of ex-Baath military along with some religious
radicals (very few of whom are foreigners). They have enough munitions, money
and know-how to fight for years, though in the end they will lose. The Sunni
Arab populace continues largely to support the guerrillas. Over half in a recent
poll said that attacks on the U.S. military in Iraq are legitimate.

One disturbing trend in this election was the
reinforcement of ethnic political identity. Iraq is a diverse society, but has
most often sought forms of politics that deemphasize ethnicity. The price of
such an approach, however, has often been authoritarian rule, as under the
pan-Arab Baath Party that ruled from 1968 to 2003. In the north of Iraq, Kurds
predominate. They do not speak Arabic as their mother tongue but rather an
Indo-European language related to Persian (and distantly to English). Their
Islam is mystical, traditional and somewhat rural, and most of them are not very
interested in the minutiae of religious law. In recent years they have
urbanized, as at Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, but have developed a relatively
liberal approach to Islam and politics. Kurds had long had separatist tendencies
and faced severe repression from Baghdad. Under the American no-fly zone of the
1990s, they developed a Kurdistan Regional Assembly, virtually a semiautonomous
government, and now fear being reintegrated into Arab Iraq as second-class
citizens.

The center-north of Iraq is dominated by Sunni
Arabs. Arabs are simply populations that speak Arabic as their native language;
they are not a racial category. Sunnis constitute some 90 percent of the Muslims
in the world, but are a minority of 20 percent in Iraq. They honor four early
"rightly guided" caliphs, or vicars, of the prophet Mohammed and lack a strict
clerical hierarchy. Sunni reformists often resemble Protestants in rejecting
saint-worship and mediation between God and human beings.

East Baghdad and the south are Shiite Arab
territory. Shiites honor the prophet's son-in-law and cousin, Ali, as the
rightful successor of Mohammed, and invest the descendants of the prophet with
special honor. The Iraqi Shiites do have a clerical hierarchy, at the pinnacle
of which is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the chief source of religious
authority.

In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs have traditionally
predominated, and they have held political power until Jan. 30. During the past
three centuries, a conversion movement among tribes in the south has produced a
Shiite majority in Iraq. But the Shiites were most often poor, rural and
relatively powerless. In the past half-century, many have moved to the cities,
gained modern educations, and thrown up religious parties that aim to establish
an Islamic republic with a Shiite cast. These parties joined together to form
the United Iraqi Alliance.

The UIA appears to have done extremely well in
many Iraqi provinces and may well dominate the new Parliament. Because the Sunni
Arabs did not come out in force to vote, the Shiite religious vote was
magnified. That is, the electoral system is such that parties are seated in
Parliament in accordance with their proportion of the national vote. If a party
gets 10 percent, it will get about 27 seats. Because of the proportional nature
of the election, if one group boycotts, the other groups do even better. The
Shiite leadership will try to reach out to the Sunni Arab politicians, including
them in the new government and in the constitution-drafting process. But since
the Sunnis will have relatively few seats in Parliament, they may be even more
sullen than before. Moreover, the politics of the UIA may not be to their
liking.

If the United Iraqi Alliance can form a
government, probably in coalition with smaller parties, it will almost certainly
move in two controversial directions. First, it will seek to implement religious
law in the place of civil law for matters of personal status, and possibly in
other realms, such as commerce. Islamic law has provisions for matters such as
marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony and so forth. Muslim fundamentalists
throughout the world have adopted as one of their main political goals the
repeal of civil laws that were most often adopted during or just after the age
of European colonialism (roughly from the mid-1700s until the 1960s), and to
replace them with a rigid and often medieval interpretation of Islamic law.

This form of Islamic law (which in other hands
can be dynamic and innovative) would typically deny divorced women any
inheritance, give girls half the inheritance received by their brothers,
restrict women's right to initiate divorce, restrict women's appearance in
public, and make the testimony of women in court worth half that of a man.
Middle-class Sunni Arabs and educated women, along with most Kurds, would likely
strongly resist this initiative. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, among the main Shiite parties, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani have already
telegraphed their desire for this change.

The other big political fight likely to ensue in
the new, Shiite-dominated Parliament is over a centralized government versus a
loose federation. The Kurds want what they call a "Canada" model, or perhaps one
modeled on the Swiss cantons, in which the central government cedes many rights
to the provinces. In American terms, the Kurds want "states' rights." Their
maximal demands are the creation of a Kurdish super-province, Kurdistan, on an
ethnic basis; the joining to Kurdistan of the oil-rich Kirkuk area; no federal
troops on Kurdistan soil; and the retention of petroleum profits inside the
Kurdistan province.

In contrast, the Shiite political traditions in
Iraq have all favored a strong central government, and Baghdad and Najaf are
unlikely to want to give away so much to "Kurdistan." Since the Kurds will be
well represented in Parliament, have a big, well-trained paramilitary, and have
a veto over any new constitution, this particular struggle is one they will not
concede without a fight.

Although the vast majority of Iraqis want U.S.
troops out of their country immediately or soon after Parliament is seated,
according to a recent Zogby poll, it seems unlikely that the new political class
will call for a precipitate U.S. withdrawal. They are still afraid of being
assassinated by the guerrillas. Over time a split may develop between the rank
and file, impatient for an American departure, and politicians who still depend
on U.S. forces for their own protection. When Iraqi leaders feel strong enough
to deal with the guerrillas by themselves, they will have a strong impetus to
ask the United States to leave altogether. All Iraqis remember Abu Ghraib and
other missteps of the U.S. military in their country.

The new Iraq is forming, but its formation will
involve struggle as well as compromise, strong stands as well as bargaining. How
successful post-Saddam Iraq is depends very much on whether all groups are
mature enough to make the necessary compromises and strike a balance between the
religious and secular, and between the center and the provinces.

About the writer
Juan Cole is a professor of
modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and
the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).

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