Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.
Ten days before the first elections in Iraq for a permanent (i.e., not interim) government, there is a small chance that the results could open one more door toward a political settlement of the war.
But it is indeed a small chance. First, of course, the election is still being held under a U.S. occupation of the country, which automatically makes the results suspect in the eyes of many, if not most, Iraqis, who continue to call for a U.S. withdrawal. Second, the ruling alliance of the Shiite religious parties (SCIRI, Dawa and the Muqtada Sadr gang) is still the odds-on favorite to emerge dominant once again after Dec. 15, and their leaders are dead set against the sort of concessions needed to placate angry Sunnis and to engage in peace talks with the Baathist-military resistance. And third, even if they do not win fairly, the Shiite-led ruling coalition is likely to engage in massive fraud in counting votes. The assassination attempt earlier this week aimed at Iyad Allawi, a secular Iraqi who leads one of the main blocs opposed to the religious Shiites, and the subsequent rocket attack on his offices in Najaf show just how far the Shiite powers will go to impose their will.
To get a handle on how things look before the election, I spoke by telephone to Baghdad with Aiham Al Sammarae, whose Independent Iraq party is one of the groups on the ballot. Regular readers of this space will recognize Sammarae as the former electricity minister in the interim government who has spent the past year trying to mediate between the United States and the Iraqi armed resistance. (Read the whole transcript of my talk with Sammarae at The Dreyfuss Report .)
According to Sammarae, the Shiite-led coalition has lost enormous credibility since taking power last spring—even among Shiite voters. “There are no jobs, there is no security. So people are asking, ‘What the hell are those guys doing?’” he said. “The time is over for them. They blew it.” Sammarae predicts that the Shiite-religious alliance will end up with no more than 60 to 70 seats in the 275-member National Assembly. And he predicts that the Kurds will get something like 50 seats, the religious-Sunni bloc will get 35, the secular Sunni bloc about 40, and that Allawi’s non-sectarian party will attract enough Shiite and Sunni votes to win 40 seats. Conceivably, such a result could allow a governing coalition to emerge that would eclipse the SCIRI-Dawa-Sadr bloc.
The results of the election, he said, would determine whether the peace process that began in Cairo, and then stalled, will go forward. “It depends on the election. If the election goes well”—i.e., if the Shiite bloc is defeated—“there will be a conference in February. If those guys come back, there will be no conference.” That’s because the radical-right Shiite religious parties have generated hatred, anger and bitterness on the Sunni side, and because they will not allow talks with the Baathist-military resistance to proceed.
The Shiite religious bloc has effectively scuttled the Cairo talks, according to Sammarae. No significant talks are underway between the resistance and the government in Iraq, he said, and although Ambassador Khalilzad has declared his readiness to take part in talks with the insurgency, so far at least, those talks are happening only in the field. Sammarae said: “So far there is nothing central, nothing by the ambassador. The ambassador meets with some Sunni groups, but not to negotiate.”
The Shiite-religious bloc sabotaged Cairo, he said. Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa, crossed off the names of everyone he didn’t like, barring them from the Cairo meeting—including Sammarae. And although some representatives of the Iraqi resistance went to Cairo, all they could manage was a meeting with the secretary-general of the Arab League, and then they left. Despite the statement issued after the conference, in which all parties recognized the right of Iraqis to resist occupation, over the past two weeks the enmity among Iraq’s factions has intensified, he said. The violence has worsened, and the reports of Shiite-led death squads and mass killings have angered and frightened secular Iraqis and Sunnis.
Many media reports out of Iraq in the past 10 days support Sammarae’s argument that even Iraq’s Shiite population is fed up with the sectarianism of the Shiite-religious bloc. Allawi’s campaign, in the heart of the Shiite territory, including in Najaf, is clearly enough of a threat to the ruling bloc that their paramilitary forces have tried to kill him. Ayatollah Sistani, who supposedly intended to be neutral in the election, has issued a fatwa -style declaration urging Shiites to march to the polls and vote for the religious candidates—i.e., not Allawi.
The task before the next National Assembly will be enormous: first, to rewrite the absurdly biased constitution imposed by the Shiite bloc on Oct. 15; to negotiate the pullout of U.S. forces; and to work out a ceasefire between the government and the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance. Tall orders, all. If the Sistani-backed, Shiite-led religious parties manage to steal another election victory, chances that Iraq can avoid civil war are virtually nil.
