|
Bush Administration Remains Detached From Reality.
By Juan Cole
12/18/05 -- -- Since Bush is going to say Sunday that the Sunni
Arab participation in the elections suggests a near end of major
guerrilla violence,
let me just repeat what I said Thursday: the history of
guerrilla insurgencies is replete with groups that simulaneously
fought on both the political and paramilitary fronts. Listen to how
angry the Sunni politicians are, as they speak out in the wake of
the elections, both at Bush and at the Shiites, and you get a sense
of how detached the Bush administration remains from reality.
A major Sunni leader whose list (the National Dialogue Council)
seems to be doing well, Salih Mutlak, just came on Arabic satellite
television and gave a strident anti-American speech. He addressed
Bush, warning him not to believe that a fair election had just
occurred in Iraq, and denounced the continued US military occupation
of his country. He also lashed out at Shiite politicians. Mutlak is
a secular Arab nationalist who still praises the Baath Party.
Mutlak's emergence as a likely power broker in the Iraqi parliament
is good news for Bush?
By the way, the assertion Bush keeps making that the political
developments in Iraq will influence the rest of the Middle East is
ridiculous to anyone who actually talks to anyone from the region.
Arabs mostly believe that Iraq is laboring under an oppressive
foreign military occupation. You can't bring up Iraq without them
saying, "The Americans are doing such horrible things there." They
think of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and of the Ministry of Interior's
secret torture cells, not of parliamentary debates. Few think the
Iraqi elections are aboveboard, and few are very interested in them.
In Beirut, the newspapers have been putting a short article on the
elections below the fold every day since Wednesday, and that is
about it. It isn't even really positioned as important news; the New
York Times puts it higher on the page than most Arab newspapers.
An American living in Egypt who was teaching out in the provinces in
a major city told me about recently witnessing a student
demonstration that included a skit. Thousands of students had come
out, and some grade schoolers were there in the front row. On the
steps of an academic hall, Islamist students enacted a play about an
Iraqi suicide bomber blowing up US troops, to enormous glee and
applause. That's what most Arabs think about Iraq, on the outside.
They don't want to emulate an American-occupied country. Bush's
naive conviction that his project is exemplary reminds me of the way
the Communists in Russia initially thought that all the factory
workers in the West would want immediately to imitate their worker's
paradise. Of course, few wanted to give up their unions and consumer
lifestyle so as to become the wards of a one-party state. Likewise,
American Imperial "democracy" strikes most Arabs as paternalistic
and hypocritical, masking a police state of a sort they are all too
familiar with.
The guerrilla war started back up in Iraq on Saturday and
Sunday, with a number of bombings and shootings. On Saturday, 13
Iraqis were killed in separate guerrilla attacks. They included an
official of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council
for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading party in the outgoing
parliament.
Al-Hayat [Ar.] : The London-based Saudi daily says that
most signs suggest that the bloc of young Shiite nationalist Muqtada
al-Sadr will form a major element in the new Iraqi parliament, and
that other parties will seek an alliance with it. Among the first to
broach such an alliance is outgoing prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari,
who spoke in Najaf on Saturday.
As for the Sunni Arabs, they celebrated their return as a power in
political life, forming processions in various cities. The leader of
the Concord Front thanked the armed resistance for refraining from
attacks on Sunnis who came out to vote.
[AP
says that Adnan Dulaimi, leader of an important Sunni bloc,
expressed a willingness to ally either with the Kurds and the Allawi
list, or with the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. He is quoted as
saying, "For the sake of Iraq, there is nothing impossible. We have
to forget the past and we extend our hands to everybody. . ."
Dulaimi is a Sunni fundamentalist, and obviously differs with his
secular colleague, Salih Mutlak.
[A parliament jointly dominated by Muqtada Al-Sadr's people and
Sunnis like Dulaimi would certainly demand an early departure of US
troops. To
Mickey Kaus, who asked why I thought parliament might make such a
demand even though it is clear that the parliament could not
keep order in the country if the US troops suddenly left, I would
just reply: have you been listening to what the Sunni parties
and the Sadrists have been saying for the past 2 1/2 years? Asking
why politicians might do something that causes chaos is sort of
naive, isn't it? Surely George W. Bush wouldn't have risked
destabilizing Iraq and the Middle East with a rushed invasion based
on faulty intelligence? He thinks Muqtada al-Sadr and Salih Mutlak
are better than Bush?]
Al-Hayat: Observers said that the expectation is that the Kurdistan
Alliance will retain the presidency and that the Sunni Arabs will be
given the post of speaker of the house, but that if they want to
switch places, the negotiations would be up to them.
One close observer, al-Rubaie, said that the initial returns
suggested that the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi
Alliance, would gain 133 seats. If the small Shiite lists join it,
and if negotiations with the Kurdistan Islamic Union succeed, it
would be able to form a government. The KIU is said to have gained
18 seats. He said that the Sadr bloc would play an important role in
taking decisions within the Alliance, since its candidates within
the United Iraqi Alliance gained more seats than any other coalition
partner. It is said that the candidates of the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq did poorly.
(Since the elections were held on a province basis, and the United
Iraq Alliance ran a list in each province, on which the Sadrists and
SCIRI were apportioned equal numbers of candidates, there are only
two ways I can understand such an outcome--if it is being accurately
reported. One is that the Sadrists are a social movement, not a
party. If a lot of Sadrist-leaning candidates ran on other lists
than the UIA, and did well, they would add to the 30 seats
apportioned within the UIA to Muqtada's people. The other
possibility is that the UIA wanted the Sadrists so badly that they
front-loaded Muqtada's people, putting them at the top of the list.
In this case they would have been seated before the SCIRI
candidates, and in provinces where the UIA did not gain all the
seats, SCIRI would have been disadvantaged. I'm just speculating; it
isn't clear what is going on here--and it could just be spin by
Muqtada's people.)
Ed Wong of the NYT reports that the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq is confident enough of its own position in the
new parliament to push for Adel Abdul Mahdi as prime minister. The
outgoing prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, is from the Dawa Party, a
coalition partner of SCIRI in the UIA. Abdul Mahdi is known to be a
free marketeer who is close to the Americans, and is the most
acceptable figure in SCIRI to Washington.
Jaafari held a joint press conference on Saturday with Muqtada after
he met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He seemed to assume that
the UIA had won again. Jaafari said, "I am addressing our people in
Mosul and Ramadi and Tikrit. I say to them that your people in
Najaf, Karbala and Hillah have long waited to work with you under
the dome of parliament to build a new Iraq." He continued before a
large rally that had come out to greet him, "I address my words to
our brethren, the clergy in Mosul and Anbar and Tikrit, and I say to
them that this is the time to employ the pulpit to spread the ideas
of unity and liberty, and to affirm our principles, with which we
have been inspired by the revelation of the Quran and the practice
[Sunnah] of the Prophet." He also called on "the Baathists" "to
return to the right path in participating with their brethren in
building Iraq," saying, "the Iraqi people are looking at them with
the eyes of compassion."
The LA Times reports that every indication is that the Allawi
list has done very poorly. Iyad Allawi has left Iraq in
disappointment, and his supporters are crying election fraud. Allawi
is an ex-Baathist who cooperated with the CIA in organizing Baath
officers who broke with Saddam in the 1990s for a coup against the
dictator. His blunt secularism, authoritarian style, rumors of
bloodthirstiness, and CIA associations make him unpopular in most of
Iraq, but the Bush administration and neoconservative think tanks
kept touting him as a possible prime minister as a result of these
elections! Western reporters talking mainly to the urban middle
class also got a false sense that his list might be gaining in
popularity.
Al-Hayat [Ar.] also reports on the participation and
non-participation of women in the Iraqi elections. Shiite women
came out in large numbers in the middle and south of the country
when the polls first opened. A majority of women in Kurdistan came
out to vote, coming with whole families, spouses and children to the
polling stations.
But in Sunni Arab Anbar and Tikrit, women tended to stay home, and
if they voted it was by sending their proxy with their husbands or
fathers so that they could vote for them.
In the Shiite south, early tabulations suggest that the
participation of eligible women voters was between 71 and 84 percent
in Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kut, Basra, and the Shiite districts
of Baghdad. Fewer women came out in heavily tribal and rural Maysan
and Samawa provinces. Most women came to the polls early, though
some waited until they had finished their housework and cooked the
family meal.
Iraqi women interviewed stressed the important role that their
spouses and fathers played in pushing them to participate in the
elections, and in encouraging them to vote for a particular party
list. The majority of women voted for religious parties, but a few
broke ranks and voted for secular ones.
Al-Hayat interviewed Um Ghufran, an employee in the municipal
government of the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, who said that she
had voted for a secular party because she liked its platform, as
well as because she wanted to get away from the influence of
religion, which had led many other women to vote for parties that
did not stand for things they believe in.
Kurdish women have more freedoms than Arab Iraqi women, but they
nevertheless tended to vote the same way their men did.
There were a number of women on the ballot in the Sunni Arab
provinces of Salahuddin and Anbar, but women were not visible at the
polling stations in either place-- though they are 54 percent of the
electorate in both. In both places, the patriarch tended to go and
vote on behalf of the entire family. Women did not go out both
because of poor security and because of local traditions of female
seclusion.
Al-Hayat talked to Samiyah Khudair, a candidate in a Sunni province,
who said "The absence of the female element from the polling
stations is a sick phenomenon that has afflicted Iraqi society after
the Occupation, as a result of the collapse of confidence among
citizens of both sexes in the security situation, which can
deteriorate badly at any moment despite the most stringent
measures."
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
