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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Monday, January 25, 2010 - 2:03 PM
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Here is a comment from Saif Abdul-Rahman, former chief of staff for the Iraqi ministry of industry, and more recently an advisor to the Iraqi vice president. I ran into him last week in Tampa, just before I had dinner with a retired Iraqi major general and some other folks, and asked him to contribute a comment on the current political situation in Iraq, in which hundreds of Sunni candidates have been excluded. He thinks the United States government should keep its powder dry so it can intervene at the crucial point after the election, when the new government is formed.
By Saifaldin D. Abdul-Rahman
Special to Best Defense
The issue of candidates being excluded from election roles in Iraq has captured the Iraqi political scene for the last week or so. It has also captivated administration folks here in Washington, who by allowing Vice President Biden to visit Iraq are throwing their weight in on the subject. VP Biden made positive public statements by saying that the Iraqis will handle the issue. Privately, VP Biden should keep to the same message. There needs to be a calculation made by the US in weighing whether or not it is in the interests of the United States to intervene. I would argue in this particular situation the short-term and long-term costs would outweigh any gains made by any US involvement in this issue.
My argument is based on the supposition that this issue will not break the political process nor irreparably damage it. The candidates that have been excluded don't necessarily have a chance at winning a seat in an election. Some may try to argue that this would disenfranchise the Sunnis and may lead to a boycott, something I seriously doubt. The Sunnis learned their lesson from the 2005 boycott and will not repeat that mistake again because of the costs they paid in doing so. Today, there is not one credible call for a boycott of the elections, nor will there be because it just will not work; even if candidates were excluded the major parties are still there and people would still vote for them undermining the whole idea of a boycott. The only real candidate to be excluded is Saleh Al-Mutlaq, who was losing support in recent days and was only able to reinvigorate his party by teaming up with Ayad Allawi. In doing so he has actually damaged Allawi, who was hoping to garner Shia votes in the South.
Based on the aforementioned suppositions, lets do a cost /benefit analysis about getting involved:
- The US intervenes: If the US and UN intervene and bring pressure to bear on Iraq's political establishment, we may succeed in reversing part of the order and therefore get some candidates reinstated; adversely we would reinforce a rallying call by Shia sectarian coalitions who have accused the United States of bringing back the Baath Party or its cohorts. This harms us in the short term because the rallying call will reinvigorate a stagnating political platform of the Shia Islamists. In the medium term, by reinvigorating that campaign it will cause a government to be elected with a sectarian Shia majority and that government will be very unhappy about the US intervention on this matter. And in the long term, it will set back efforts to encourage grassroots nationalist parties, by strengthening the already well-funded Baathists and having the adverse effect of strengthening the sectarian parties, therefore lessening the opportunities of real nationalist Sunni and Shia grassroots efforts to be established.
- The US does not intervene: If the US does not intervene, it will not significantly impact any political party, even Allawi's (there is quiet talk that Allawi benefited from Mutlaq's exclusion because it helps him with the voters of the Southern provinces, and because it leaves him completely in charge of their joint political party). We have already presupposed that this is not a structural problem for Iraq's political process and it will not harm it significantly. And, as I said, the candidates being excluded are not significant and therefore the outcome of the elections will not be impacted significantly by the exclusions.
What is most important about the second point above is that by not getting involved the US retains leverage over the parties when it comes time to actually create the government, which is more important than wasting energy and resources now. That leverage will be increased by the US reminding parties that we did not intervene before the elections and that the legitimacy of the government will be in doubt if there is not a broad representation of Iraq's political and ethnic groupings. The aforementioned argument will not be available if we intervene now, and the elections result in a resounding victory for the sectarian coalitions and they decide to create a majoritarian government excluding the Sunnis, therefore undermining the principal purpose of our intervention.
I'll admit that he has at least in part a good point in warning the U.S to remain above the matter, though I suspect his personal politics may play some role in this. However this ignores the problem that it seems to over-politicize the candidacy process and also could upset agreements made to stop the violence.
I'd also suggest we refrain from too much interference simply because I'm not sure that we actually could have much effect on matters. It's better to be seen as aloof rather than impotent.
I'm not sure how much pull the US still has in Iraq on certain issues. Militarily we still have a lot, but politically our influence is very limited. I very much doubt that the coalitions will listen to us after the election when forming a government however. A new government even if dominated by the National Alliance, the main sectarian Shiite bloc will still include some token Sunnis. One of the main Anbar sheikhs for example is part of the list. The current government includes the Sunni Islamic Party for example, but they have little real power in the government outside of VP Hadhemi who has veto power over laws, and actually left the party to form his own for this election.
JWING, you write: "Militarily we still have a lot, but politically our influence is very limited."
What do you mean when you say we still have a lot of military influence left in Iraq? If anything our military influence is on the decline and was significantly decelerated after our withdrawal from the cities on 30 June 2009. Think Col. Reese's infamous memo last year...
I think we're right to take the high road in this election as Iraqis sort themselves out politically this year. Building a tenable and open relationship with whatever striped national government is elected in March will be our decisive effort this year and down the road--however difficult that may be with a likely Shia and Iranian-friendly parliament. You are right, though, that our political influence is somewhat limited right now, but there's certainly potential for growth.
Because if you listen to the Iraqi generals, not the politicians, they will tell you that Iraq will not be able to defend itself from external threats until at least 2020. They have no air force for example. They barely have a navy. They got two warships from Italy, and crashed one into a large tanker in the Gulf recently. They bought a bunch of patrol boats and thought that adding a third motor would increase their speeds, but it actually slowed them down. That means they will be dependent upon U.S. protection until 2020 at the earliest. The Iraqi general staff says they want U.S. trainers, they want U.S. support, they want U.S. weapons, etc. That means the U.S. still has much more military influence than political in Iraq right now.
...given our demonstrated prowess at setting the course of events in the Middle East?
Or maybe just get the hell out of there and let iraq be iraq.
The price we're paying for cluelessness is just too high and attempting to recover what's already invested can only prove yet again the fallacy of sunk-cost thinking. Game over, folks. Go Home.
Well, of course. If barring candidates from running for office, along the lines of the Iranian practice, is not a problem, American intervention to solve it would be unwise.
That is one damn big assumption. It requires us to believe that the objective of not energizing the Iranian party among Iraq's Shiites requires us not to object to anything they want, and that what they want in this case -- blocking candidates from running -- won't bother anyone, even the disqualified Sunni candidates. And Tom Ricks' comment about leverage doesn't even make sense. If rigging the electoral process now draws no American objection, why should the Maliki government care what the United States has to say about the appointment of ministers later?
Let me observe also that consideration of an analysis like this must consider the source. All Ricks tells us about this Abdul Rahim person is that he is a former aide to a minister of industry (who?) and to an Iraqi Vice President (there are three). That doesn't tell us much about his partisan orientation, and that is a very relevant piece of information in this context.
The Marines have left the field...
Maybe with the Marines gone from Iraq a point of not coming back has been reached. The debate is OBE.
I don't think the U.S. really cares who wins the 2010 vote, they just want the election to happen.
Everyone talks about the "Iranian parties" and the "Islamist parties" but those are exactly who the U.S. has supported all these years. The Supreme Council was formed in Iran to take support away from the Dawa party. its Badr Brigade militia was a formal part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They, along with the two ruling Kurdish parties, got support from Iran and fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War. The Supreme Council is still largely based upon sectarian politics. And yet, VP Mahdi of the Supreme Council just went to Washington and met with top U.S. officials, and on the way back, stopped off in Tehran to talk with them.
And yet, the Supreme Council has been considered the main voice of the Shiites by the U.S. since 2003 and we considered them, along with the Dawa, the "moderate" Shiites compared to Sadr.
I agree that Sunnis will not, again, boycott an election. That was a very hard lessons, and price to pay.
What we sometimes overlook in this US attitude of "instant reconciliation" for others, is that much of the Baathist history is extreme. The Anfal was one piece of a lareg supression/genocide system with undefinable numbers in the hundreds of thousands of "disappeareds."
Spend a few months documenting that, and you gain an appreciation of the pain and fear that still lingers on humans that experienced it first hand.
Behind that was an Iraq/Iran War with over 1 million dead, heavily identified with Sunnis and Baathists.
It is not an easy thing for humans who experienced it to "forgive and forget," but piecemeal targeting of specific individuals who's past history or current threats to revive that time, is neither suprising, nor evidence of unraveling.
What the Abdul-Rahman report explains is that human nature plays out through politics, and that some balance of our understanding is needed. Walk a mile in their shoes first.
We should wait to see what the will of the people is and then intervene only if absolutely necessary. This will prove to the people that we are on their side and not playing politics. casino online italiani
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