Iraqi Elections: What is the Outcome?

The Iranian government seems to be celebrating the Iraqi election. From Iran Focus-News.

Tehran, Iran, Dec. 23 – The editorial of Iran’s leading hard-line daily hailed the outcome of Iraq’s parliamentary elections as “the creation of the first Islamist state in the Arab world”, and warned against “American plots” to prevent the formation of the new Iraqi government by Iranian-backed Shiite groups.


[...]“The American defeat and withdrawal from Iraq will forever bury the Neoconservative current in the U.S.,…while the formation of an Islamist state in Iraq, which will be a natural ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will form a contiguous link between Iran and Palestine through Syria and Lebanon, will bring about a sea change in the geo-strategic balance in the region in favour of Iran and to America’s detriment. This new alliance with its huge size will directly influence all developments in the Arab and Muslim Middle East”. Kayhan’s editorial said American officials’ recent statements on election irregularities in Iraq were aimed at forcing the pro-Iranian Shiite groups to give concessions. “They [the Iranian-backed Shiites] will not accept this”, the paper wrote. “The Americans have no choice but to leave Iraq and this must happen in the next few months”, Kayhan wrote. “Today’s Iraq shows the two sides of the Middle Eastern coin: the victory of Islamism, and the defeat and flight of the West”.

Tehran seems to be gloating. But so is Bush:
Press Conference of the President

In a nation that once lived by the whims of a brutal dictator, the Iraqi people now enjoy constitutionally protected freedoms, and their leaders now derive their powers from the consent of the government. Millions of Iraqis are looking forward to a future with hope and optimism.

But what is really happening? There are headlines that are quite disturbing. But lets dig behind the headlines for the story in Iraq. Informed Comment had a guest editorial by Andrew Arato a man who clearly knows a lot about what's going on in Iraq. Let me try to paraphrase his point of view. The Sunnis may have turned out at the election, but they are going to continue the insurrection as well. They are clearly attempting to elect a political wing as the Irish Republican Army had Sein Fein.
Kurdish representation will drop, as much as 7%, just because of the increased Sunni representation. The Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) may also drop for the same reason, but by an insignificant number.
The ultimate power in the Iraqi government is the Presidential Council. Each member of the Presidential Council, rather than only the council as a whole, will have a veto over all legislation. The Council is elected by 2/3 vote of legislative body. The UIA and a few allies will certainly be that group. If there is a sufficient block of just over 1/3 of the delegates, then that group can stop the formation of the government. If the few delegates of Alawi led by the secular Shi'ites and the Sunnis can convince the Kurds to join them, they may be able to block the formation of a government and force concessions from the UIA.
It seems likely the Kurds again will join the government with the UIA. They want control of Kirkuk. The Sunnis seem unlikely to unite behind a coalition that requires them to give up any claim on Kirkuk. Arato predicted a Sunni coalition of 30 to 40%. More recent estimates says the votes reflect 20%. And now there is a new fly in the soup.
New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 24 - An Iraqi court has ordered that at least 90 candidates in the recent national elections disqualified from serving in the Iraqi Parliament because of their ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The head of Iraq's electoral commission, Adel al-Lami, said at a news conference here Saturday afternoon that the commission would abide by the court's ruling.


While it was not clear whether more than a handful of the affected candidates would have won seats among the 275 in Parliament, the ruling bars some Sunni Arab leaders who probably would have won. And it is sure to fuel an already deep resentment among Sunni Arabs, who are likely to again have a limited role in the new government despite a large turnout at the ballot box nine days ago.


Most of the candidates affected by the ruling are Sunni Arabs, though some are secular Shiites and others opposed to the more conservative governing Shiite alliance. Several are leaders of the slate of candidates led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, including Adnan al-Janabi and Saad al-Janabi.


Sunni Arab leaders have accused the dominant Shiite political parties of widespread ballot-box stuffing and other fraud and have called for new elections.

Juan Cole has even more sobering news.

Iraqi Supreme Court has ordered the high electoral commission to heed the warning that several leading Sunni Arab candidates were high-ranking Baathists and should be disqualified. The affected candidates are largely from the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi and the Iraqi Accord Front of Salih Mutlak, both of them hospitable to secular ex-Baathists. Mutlak predicted turbulence in the streets, with perfect accuracy (of course, he helped arrange for the turbulence).


Then, Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] : and AP report that some 20,000 mainly Sunni protesters (along with some secular Shiites) came out in several cities to protest what they called election fraud. Demonstrations were held in Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit and Samarra, among other cities. The crowds demanded that new elections be held, given the extent of irregularities they maintained had occurred.


At one of the Baghdad rallies, Adnan Dulaimi of the National Dialogue Council (Sunni Islamist) demanded that the results of the election be abrogated in every province where any electoral fraud could be demonstrated. He pledged to "follow all peaceful and legal means to vindicate the truth and defeat falsehood." His coalition partner, Tariq al-Hashimi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said, "our position of rejecting the results of the elections is reinforced daily, and before us lies the difficult mission of altering the results and achieving justice." He said, "The intention to commit fraud was present even before the ballot boxes were opened." He added, "If we do not receive an answere, we will rethink our participation in politics, for we reject a political process that some desire, based on fraud and lies." The Sunni Arabs, he said, "refuse to be second class citizens."


Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumaidaie, the preacher at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in West Baghdad said in his sermon that "The Iraqi people, which had anticipated the rise of national government that would include all groups, has been shocked by the process of election fraud, and it is something that the Iraqi people absolutely will not abide." Sumaidaie had been among the few hard line members of the Association of Muslim Scholars who had called for Sunnis to participate in the elections.


In Mosul, hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Khidr Mosque toward the governor's mansion at the center of the city, carrying Iraqi flags and placards with phrases like "The Electoral Commission is Subordinating Iraq to its Neighbors" (i.e. Iran), and shouting "No, no!" to the High Electoral Commission, which they called the "High Fraudulent Commission."


The demonstrations were called by the Iraqi Accord Front, the Iraq People's Congress, and the National Dialogue Council one day after 35 coalitions, parties and movements (including some consisting of secular Shiites) rejected the early results being announced concerning the outcome of the elections. In those results, the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, won most of the seats in 9 southern provinces and in Baghdad. The demonstrators shouted that Iran had intervened in the elections, and said that even a high American official had complained about Tehran's interference (a reference to Gen. George Casey.)

In another article Juan says:

Chalabi’s INC received fewer than 9,000 votes in Baghdad. He probably will rise again. Allawi could be finished. Who will lead a “national unity” opposition to List 555 [UIA]? Step one is for the Allawi and Sunni groups to reach blocking power of 92 votes, which they probably cannot do without the PUK/KDP.


(The Bush administration's fear of Iran and of its reigning Iraqi allies in Baghdad may be destabilizing Iraq by giving ammunition to disgruntled Sunni Arabs. How many feet does the Bush administration have left to shoot itself in??)


There was a story floating around last week that a "tanker" full of "hundreds of thousands" of forged ballots coming from Iran was discovered and confiscated at the border, with the names but not the rest of the ballots filled in. This story, which has fed Sunni Arab discontent, makes no sense. First of all, you can't get hundreds of thousands of ballots on one truck, even a tanker. Paper is bulky. How would Iran have a list of plausible Iraqi voters? Iranians mostly print in nasta'liq script, not the naskh favored in the Arab world, and mostly use Persian, not Arabic. While Iranian printers could pull off such a thing, you have to ask, why? If you were going to print fake Arabic ballots for Iraq, why not just do it in Basra? It is not as if the United Iraqi Alliance, the presumed beneficiary of the alleged forgeries, does not control Iraqi printing presses in areas secure enough for it to commit fraud if it liked. I don't find the story plausible, but it appears that the US military has actually arrested Fazel "Abu Tayyib" Jasim, a provincial council member of Kut and a member of the Shiite Badr Organization (the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), implicating him in the affair. I'd like to see the truck and the ballots on television. One tanker, or even a fleet of them, couldn't affect centrally an election with millions of voters.


In any case, these actions and statements of the US military are unlikely to overturn the election results, which probably give the religious Shiites control of parliament. But they could further destabilize Iraq, if that is possible. Informed sources told al-Zaman that the new government won't be formed until late February or early March.

Again from Informed Comment there may be some hope still for a government of national unity:

The dominance of the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance in the new parliament seems more and more clear as early election results are leaked. Although the UIA did not get every seat in the 9 predominantly Shiite provinces of the south, the other small lists that got seats would almost certainly ally with it.


The two main Sunni parties and the Allawi list have rejected the election results in Iraq and demanded new elections. They are also threatening to boycott parliament if election irregularities are not addressed. But since no one thinks that the election results were actually out of line with political reality or that there will be a rerun, the Sunni parties in particular are negotiating behind the scenes for a place in the new order.


Washington is apparently encouraging the idea of a government of national unity (called for earlier this week by Jalal Talabani) as a way of reining in the Shiite fundamentalist parties, who may well be able to form a government in their own right with the help of a few small parties. Washington fears that they are too close to Iran, and also that for them to present the Sunni Arabs with a tyranny of the Shiite majority will deepen and prolong the guerrilla war.

Richard Dreyfus has a very pessimistic view in his article at TomPaine.com:

The election disaster means that it is all the more important now for the United States to open direct, public talks with the Iraqi resistance, even if it means defying the Shiite religious-led regime. It is the United States whose 160,000 troops prop up the Shiites in power. Washington can no longer afford to give SCIRI and its junior partner, Al Dawa, veto power over its ability to negotiate a ceasefire with the opposition in order to pull out U.S. forces.


But it also means that every day that the U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the United States creates another day for the Shiite religious forces to strengthen their hand, to build their militia, and to make plans for cleansing Sunnis from majority Shiite areas. (It is, of course, with the help of the U.S. army that the Shiite militias are being incorporated into the new Iraqi army, unit by unit.) By getting out of Iraq as soon as possible, Jack Murtha-style, the United States can at the very least ensure that the Shiites do not grow all-powerful, and it might prevent a further radicalization of the Sunni-led resistance. When there are no good options, then prudence suggests that it's time to choose the least bad one.

I'm not ready to give up all hope, but the situation is dire. The Sunnis are talking, hoping to form a coalition and there are some signs that a government of national unity may be possible.
Here is an official release from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

BAGHDAD, Dec. 21 -- Nearly 70 percent of eligible voters participated in parliamentary elections here last week, a turnout far exceeding that of the two previous Iraqi ballots this year, election officials said Wednesday. But they also said they were investigating at least 20 serious complaints of impropriety related to the election, the results of which have been hotly contested by a range of parties. "The question is not one of finger-pointing at a particular list or group, because from the information and complaints we have now, violations took place" in all provinces, said Abdul-Hussein Hendawi, who heads the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. He provided only general details on what violations were being investigated but said U.N. experts were involved in the investigation.


[...]But several Sunni parties, along with a diverse coalition led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, have said they were victimized by fraud and other violations of electoral law ranging from ballot-box stuffing, to people being bused outside their home regions to vote, to police-linked militias intimidating voters. Several parties hoping to contest the election results gathered in Baghdad on Wednesday to plot strategy, among them Allawi's Iraqi National Accord slate; the Tawafaq front, which got the most votes among Sunni parties; and the National Dialogue Front, led by Sunni hard-liner Saleh Mutlak. "Our main demand is that the commission should delete names of candidates and even slates if necessary, because they cheated," said Ibrahim Janabi, who is aligned with Allawi.

And again from Informed Comment:

Al-Hayat says that Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and current president, is calling for a government of national unity that will include Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. Al-Sharq al-Awsat is franker about Talabani's rationale here, since he said that the Shiite-Kurdish alliance between him and prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari had not been successful. Talabani never got along with Jaafari, and was uncomfortable with being merely a ceremonial president, as is called for in the Iraqi constitution.

Then from Tehran Times:

Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Saturday called for calm and the creation of a government of national unity in the wake of the December 15 general elections, a senior official said.

Success for Bush in Iraq is hanging by a thread. If Sistani and Talabani can pull off a national unity government, they will have to work together. If they work against each other, only Sistani will have the clout to pull it off. And his method is unlikely to contain UIA. What an interesting realignment there would be if Sistani and the religious Shia parties teamed up with Talabani and Allawi and the Sunnis. Could Sistani have the courage to do this? This seems to me to be the only scenario that would head off a civil/proxy regional war.
If this unlikely scenio bears no fruit, then nothing short of a regional war is inevitable. It would seem to me that this war would last a decade and disrupt 20% of the world's oil supplies. Unless by some miracle, the EU decides to join the US and Israel, and make war on Iran, it seems likely that Iran will get it's wish of a Shi'ite Cresent from Iran to Palestine. That does not bode well for Sunni sensibilities. I think we will see a regional war, perhaps by proxy using the Sunni's of Iraq as cannon fodder. And all of a sudden Bush has to eat crow and support the Baathists in Iraq, just to contain Iran. Throw China into the mix, we may already see the allignment of WWIII.