On a recent Saturday night in Baghdad, four workers for a newly formed Iraqi political party, known as Ahrar, tried to put up posters of their candidate in Sadr City. Before finishing the job, they were detained for 24 hours by an Iraqi Army unit. Three days later, in the northern city of Mosul, five of Ahrar’s campaign workers were interrupted while erecting a 12 by 5 metre billboard—unknown gunmen opened fire on them. The following morning, one of the candidates running on their list was ambushed by an armed militia in the eastern province of Maysan—the candidate escaped but one of his bodyguards was killed. “It is an extremely disturbing situation we have, once again, been faced with,” Ahrar’s leader, Jamal Ayad Aldin said. “The current government and our opponents will stop at nothing to prevent a fair and democratic election.”
The Ahrar Party’s campaign experience in the run-up to Iraq’s national elections, scheduled for March 7, is not atypical. That same week, a string of bombs went off across Sadr City, exploding outside the offices of four high profile Sunni parties, injuring two. The campaign season has been punctuated by massive car bombings targeting government buildings, which have killed over 600 people. Employees of Iraq’s Independent Election Commission have been victims of assassinations and kidnappings, and over the past three months, political candidates across the country have campaigned in fear, as dozens have been targeted for politically motivated killings.
As if persistent violence wasn’t enough of a threat to the elections, the government in Baghdad hasn’t helped much, either, pushing forward on a controversial decision to ban over 400 candidates—mostly secular politicians and Sunnis—from running. This move, which angered the Sunni community and caused one major political party to suspend its campaign, was viewed as a way for the Shiite Islamist parties in government to consolidate their power and get rid of their most powerful secular political rivals.
The public appetite for the vote, too, appears to be greatly diminished. Though reliable polling data is hard to come by, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence. Food ration distribution centers in Baghdad are responsible for handing out voter cards—on a recent visit to one of these shops at a neighborhood in Baghdad, the man in charge said he had only handed out approximately 300 of the 1,400 cards available to eligible voters. “No one cares about this election,” he told me. “The only people who have picked up cards work for the government.” A Kurdish election official admitted in an interview that, if given the choice, she would “vote for Saddam Hussein. Ninety nine percent of the people in this office would vote for Saddam if he was on the ballot.” Baghdad itself has an uneasy, tense, feel to it. An article this week in one Iraqi newspaper, As-Sharq Al-Aswat, said that “Baghdad does not look much different from when it was on the brink of civil war in 2006,” with sectarian tensions resurfacing as political parties vie for votes among their sects.
The turmoil has added up to an election crisis in Iraq. A botched election, American and Iraqi officials warn, will threaten the country’s fragile security. Sectarian violence—which killed tens of thousands of Iraqis during two years of brutal fighting from 2006-2008—could flare up again. President Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw to 50,000 troops by the end of August could get sidetracked. More importantly, if the government that gets elected is seen by the public as illegitimate and overly sectarian, the stage will be set for another round of bitter fighting after the Americans leave.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this election is what it tells us about the next one in 2014. If the new government resembles the current government, then it would seem there won’t be much real interest in reconciliation or accommodating one’s political opponents. What are the chances that in four years, when American influence has diminished even more, that Shiite Islamist government will be more willing to compromise with its enemies? Almost every recent signal suggests that a Shiite Islamist government in Baghdad will use its political power not to strengthen Iraq’s democratic institutions, but to strengthen their own power and strangle any opposition party that stands in their way. In fact, we might be witnessing Iraq’s last election, the final gasp of an always suspect democratic process before a return to a more familiar authoritarianism.
Trying to make sense of the ever shifting, violent and often opaque swamp of Iraqi politics is a daunting challenge. However, during interviews with dozens of Iraqi politicians, American diplomatic and military officials, scores of regular voters, as well as the top advisers to the prime minister of Iraq, an unsettling picture emerges. This election will bring in the sixth—yes, sixth—change of government in a seven year period, which has certainly helped create this tremendous political instability. Despite America’s hope that Iraq is on the path towards a society governed by a “rule of law” and political system buttressed by strong institutions, the reality is that the country still operates on a politics of personality. Whether something is legal or illegal is almost irrelevant. What can be done, and what will be done, is not based on legal or institutional grounds but the force of the political personalities, the parties behind whatever action is being taken, and the armed groups backing them up.
Here are a list of the players, the political blocs, and few possible scenarios for an election that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus called “enormously important.”
Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki: Maliki is the accidental Prime Minister. Relatively unknown when he came to power in April of 2006, he was considered a comprise candidate—a weak Shiite, who, the political parties believed, could be easily pushed around. No longer. He made his reputation by bringing relative security back to the streets of the country, doing serious damage to the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda, and standing up to Moqtada Al Sadr’s Shiite militia in Basra. Nowadays, he’s mostly criticized for being too powerful, a leader on his way towards authoritarianism. His critics regularly call him a “dictator.”
Six months ago, Maliki was considered a shoe-in to keep his job as Prime Minister. He was riding high off provincial elections victories where his State of Law Party cleaned up, a win that seemed to indicate an end to sectarian politics and a return to a political culture based on a secular, national, Iraqi identity. But then a series of high profile bombing damaged his security credentials, killing hundreds and sparking anger against government incompetence and corruption. His moves to reach out across sectarian lines also backfired. He angered members of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq—the largest Shiite religious party—and followers of Moqtada Al-Sadr when he refused to join their political coalition this past fall. This in turn angered Iran—which gave its blessing to the Shiite coalition—leaving Maliki with few Shiite allies.
He reached out to Sunni leaders, too, but he wasn’t able to get any of the more popular politicians to team up with him. On the international stage, he’s had very poor relationships with Saudi Arabia and Syria, while the Americans continue to have lukewarm feelings about him. This has left Maliki, as one of his top advisers told me in an interview last month, in very difficult political position, surrounded by and under siege by his enemies. “He’s placed himself over the fire,” his adviser said. “Who knows where we are going to be next month.”
Maliki, his advisers told me, has chosen a strategy to essentially run on his name alone. It might work—he’s is still the most popular politician in Iraq. This could produce a scenario where Maliki gets the most votes but, because of the way Iraq’s parliamentary system is set up, he won’t be able to cobble together enough of a political bloc in parliament to get himself elected prime minister.
Ahmed Chalabi: Chalabi—once a Pentagon ally who supplied the United States with faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, easing the way towards the invasion of Iraq—has resurfaced as powerful player in Iraqi politics. As head of the Truth and Accountability Commission (formerly the Debaathification Committee) Chalabi, according to U.S. officials, tried to engineer the disqualification of some 500 candidates from the ballot, claiming that they had ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. U.S. officials now claim that Chalabi is an Iranian agent, and the ban was the brainchild of Tehran.
Chalabi’s ban prompted the current political crisis, and US Vice President Joe Biden paid a visit to Baghdad to personally intervene. But the fate of the barred candidates still remains unclear. Because they were largely secular candidates and Sunni politicians, Western officials worry that the country could see a repeat of the 2005 elections, after which the Sunni population felt disenfranchised, leading to widespread sectarian fighting and nearly three years of full blown civil war. No matter the result, expect Chalabi to remain an influential player within the Iraqi government for years to come.
Ayad Allawi: Former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is again being considered the Great Secular Hope for the country. As in 2005 election, according to U.S. officials, Allawi appears to be polling well. The trouble is, the polling numbers were not reflected in the result last time, apparently due to a sampling bias of educated, Western-friendly, secular, Iraqis (Allawi performed very disappointingly in the 2005 elections).
Allawi’s Iraqiya list—the largest secular bloc—was also the list most affected by the candidate ban. They lost one of their most popular figures, Sunni politician Saleh Mutlaq. In response, Allawi has suspended his campaign, and is sending signals that he might boycott the election if Mutlaq isn’t allowed to run. Allawi warned last week that if the election continued as is, it would set the country up for “sectarianism and on the route to civil war.”
The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadrists: The largest Shiite alliance performed poorly in the provincial elections. Now they’re desperately trying to make up ground and keep their grip on power in the national government. The reason for their unpopularity: ISCI, in particular, is widely viewed as a proxy of Iran, an image that wasn’t helped when the talks for the alliance took place in Tehran, with the blessing of that regime.
Although relations with Maliki have been frosty recently, political observers speculate that a post-election partnership with Maliki’s party might be possible if neither group has enough seats to form a government.
The Kurds: The Kurds are guaranteed at least 40 of the 325 seats, and are expected to get close to 60. Despite internal differences, they are planning to present a unified front in Baghdad. Whatever the outcome of the election, the Kurds will be crucial in determining the next prime minister, embracing their role as the so-called kingmaker. The Kurds will likely throw their support behind a candidate they think will be most willing to give them concessions on the issue they view as most important—Kirkuk, the disputed oil rich northern city that is divided between Arab an Kurd. The Kurds claim Kirkuk as their own, including it in the boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan, part of Iraq that is nearly its own independent country already. The Arabs say they have as much right to Kirkuk as the Kurds, and accuse the Kurds of resettling Kurds in Kirkuk to inflate the Kurdish population there.
American officials consider Kirkuk one of Iraq’s existential issues: a problem with no easy fix that is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. US military officials worry that the Kurdish and Arab tensions over Kirkuk could break into a shooting war, threatening both Iraq and the region’s stability. This almost happened this past summer, with Kurdish forces facing off against the Iraqi Army. The US then instituted a joint Kurdish and Arab patrol plan along the so called Green Line, the boundary between Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Certainly, in the coming decades, Kurdish leaders plan to officially break away from Iraq, so a violent conflict might be unavoidable.
The Americans: The blunt talking US Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, has been tasked by the Obama administration with overseeing the transition of the American role in Iraq to one of relative normalcy—that is, to forge a more normal diplomatic relationship between the two countries. That’s still a ways off—he’s played an active role first in passing the election law, and then in trying to resolve the dispute over the candidate bans. Expect Hill to be working overtime during the government’s formation process, which, the ambassador has already warned, is likely to take many months.
General Ray Ordierno, commander of all US forces in Iraq, has moved ahead with withdrawal plans despite the continued violence. There are now only 100,000 troops left in Iraq—the lowest at any point during the war. The Americans have convinced themselves that they’ve won the war, and are pushing hard to send the message home that the war has ended—just this week, the military announced a name change for their mission, from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (which has been the name since 2003) to “Operation New Dawn”. And, it’s true, for the US, the war is winding down—the question is if the elections will end the war for Iraqis, or if it will be a step towards reigniting the conflict.
Michael Hastings – author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story, recently released in paperback, and regular contributor to GQ.
