The Political Battle In Iraq

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The Political Battle in Iraq

Iraq, Middle East, Governance, National Security



Kenneth M. Pollack, Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy



The Brookings Institution

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DeliciousDiggFacebookGoogleLinkedInLiveNewsvineStumbleUponYahooTwitter.June 30, 2010 —

In late June 2010, I traveled to Iraq for a bit less than one week with another well-known Middle East expert. This was my tenth trip to Iraq since the fall of Saddam, but my first in about eight months. The trip was organized and partially-funded by the U.S. military command in Iraq—now known as United States Forces-Iraq (USF-I). However, our U.S. military liaisons were extremely generous and flexible in allowing us to set our own agenda. We had superb access to U.S. military and civilian personnel at all levels of the chain of command, as well as the leadership of the U.S. Embassy and civilian intelligence personnel. We met with senior UN officials in Iraq and had numerous private meetings with many of the most senior Iraqi officials and party leaders from all of the most powerful parties. Indeed, with the exception of the two Kurdish parties, our access to senior Iraqi leaders could not have been better. We spent brief periods in Tikrit, Kirkuk and Mahmour (near Mosul), but the overwhelming majority of our time was spent in Baghdad. The following presents my impressions, conclusions, and analysis from that trip.

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A woman walks past a damaged vehicle at the site of a bomb attack in Baghdad.



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Reuters/Saad Shalash

The Political Battle Over Government Formation



Iraqi politics are dead-locked. The results of the March 7 elections were a resounding victory for Iraq, and for America’s interests in Iraq in that Iraqis largely voted for the two parties considered most secular, least connected with formal militias, least tied to the vicious sectarianism of the civil war, and most desirous of meeting popular demands for political, economic and social stability and progress.[1] Unfortunately, in large part because of Iraq’s reliance on a proportional representation system, the election did not hand either party a clear-cut majority. Instead, ‘Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiyya took 91 seats in the 325-seat Council of Representatives and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law (SoL) coalition garnered 89. This has left them as two Gullivers surrounded by a dozen or more liliputians. It also left them well short of the 163 votes needed to secure a majority. Moreover, the first vote will have to be cast for president, who will then invite one of the two leading parties to form a government, and it requires a two-thirds majority to elect the president. Since the presidency itself is hotly contested and is likely to be part of the overall “package” of the new government, it is likely that either party will have to secure an even larger coalition to take power.



As things stand, most of the smaller parties remain on the fence, waiting to see which of the contenders will offer them the best deal. They are also waiting to try to gauge which is most likely to secure the votes necessary to form the government because once it becomes clear that one of the parties can do so, all of the smaller parties will likely scramble to try to join that side in hope of being rewarded with plum cabinet and governmental posts (and avoid being shut out of the same).



The problem is that neither of the two major parties has been able to convince enough of the smaller parties to declare for them. Prime Minister Maliki has arguably done better, striking a tentative deal with the Iraqi National Accord, itself a shotgun marriage of the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). However, this deal lacks one critical final piece: a decision over who will be the grouping’s prime ministerial candidate. Both ISCI and the Sadrists have so far refused to accept Maliki as their prime ministerial candidate (with ISCI preferring ‘Adel ‘Abd al-Mahdi, and the Sadrists preferring Ibrahim Jaafari). But SoL is built around the person of Nuri al-Maliki, who will not accept that anyone will be prime minister but him.



Maliki’s negotiating strategy has been to hammer out an agreement with INA in which he would be their prime ministerial candidate, and then turn to Allawi’s Iraqiyya and start bargaining with them to see if SoL and Iraqiyya could form an alternative coalition. In these negotiations Maliki would have the advantage because he would be able to use his commitment from the INA as leverage to extract concessions from Iraqiyya—in effect saying to Allawi, “If I go with the INA I get to remain prime minister, so if you want me to go with you, Iraqiyya, you are going to need to do even better than that.” Thus, a firm deal with the INA would put Maliki in the driver’s seat for all of the negotiations.



But because Maliki cannot yet secure the INA’s agreement for him to be the prime minister, he cannot yet begin negotiations with Iraqiyya in earnest. Thus, a key question is whether Maliki can find a way to bribe, persuade or coerce the Sadrists (the dominant force in the INA) to agree to name him their joint prime ministerial candidate. For now, however, the Sadrists and teir candidate, former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, seem more than content to wait and force Maliki to accept that he won’t be prime minister again. It is not clear what it will take, if anything at all, to get them to change their position on this. Indeed, Maliki has actually begun tentative contacts with Iraqiyya recently in part because the US and UN have been pressing him to do so. However, of greater importance, Maliki hopes that this will frighten the Sadrists that he is about to cut a deal with Allawi that would leave the INA out in the cold, and so convince them to accept him as the prime minister in a SoL-INA government.



Iraqiyya’s Approach



For its part, Iraqiyya appears to be trying a dual-track strategy to win the game. First, they are showing enormous patience in the expectation that the intra-Shi’ah divisions will prove too great and eventually one or more of the Shi’ah parties will turn to them as an easier coalition partner. There is certainly evidence to support this gambit. They are sitting on the largest cohesive bloc of seats in the CoR, and their secular, technocratic ideology makes them amenable partners for many Iraqi parties. At least some of Iraqiyya’s senior leaders seem to feel that, at some point, the personal and ideological rivalries among the Shi’ah will drive things in this direction.



However, it would be wrong to assume that Iraqiyya’s strategy is entirely passive and patient. Many of its key leaders are pushing down a very different, much more active path. Iraqiyya won the largest number of seats in the parliament and its partisans are arguing vociferously that the constitution gives them the right to try first to form a government. This argument has been directed principally at the United States, UNAMI and other foreign states (particularly Iraq’s neighbors) all of whom carry considerable weight among Iraqi groups. Iraqiyya has mustered evidence to discredit the statement by Iraqi chief justice Medhat al-Muhammad in which he suggested that either the party with the largest number of seats, or the post-election coalition with the largest number of seats could be asked first to try to form a government. Iraqiyya’s position is that this was merely an “opinion” and a politically-pressured, unconstitutional opinion at that. They have also deployed the potentially compelling argument that Iraqis voted overwhelmingly for change, for secularism, and for technocracy—all of which Iraqiyya represents—and that a government led by Maliki as prime minister in coalition with the Kurds, ISCI and the Sadrists (the same coalition as ruled Iraq from 2005 till today) would be a betrayal of the votes of the Iraqi people. They point to recent protests in Basra against the failure of the government to provide greater electricity as evidence of what will happen if the people believe that the election was “stolen,” Iraqi democracy subverted and the will of the people ignored.



Consequently, many Iraqiyya leaders would like to see the logjam broken by the United States (and the UN, and various other external actors) weighing in on Allawi’s behalf. Although American influence in Iraq is declining, it is still very significant, and because of the political deadlock, that influence is rising again with many Iraqis looking to the United States as a mediator to help them out of this situation.



If the United States were to do so, there is a very real likelihood that Allawi would be able to form a new government. First, Iraqis would see this as further proof that the United States wanted him to be prime minister (not necessarily true, but compelling for many Iraqis nonetheless) and that therefore benefits would accrue from the U.S. for those who joined him. Second, Allawi would then be in a position to give out cabinet ministries which could create a self-fulfilling prophecy: many Iraqi parties would reason that others would agree to join Allawi’s government if only so as not to be left out, and that whoever signed on first would be likely to get the best cabinet positions. The result could easily be a chain reaction with parties signing on simply to avoid being left without anything, thereby creating a powerful incentive for more and more parties to sign on for the same reason.



Muddling Along



At present, the Sadrists show no signs of agreeing to take Maliki as their prime ministerial candidate and the United States shows no sign of pressing for Allawi to get the right to form a government first. Consequently, the focus is now shifting to a UN-led, American-backed procedural process by which the UN Special Representative will convene a gathering of experts from all of the major political parties who will attempt to redefine the positions and authorities of the Iraqi executive branch in the hope that doing so will unlock the bargaining positions of the different sides and allow for the formation of coalitions that are currently impossible.



For instance, many Iraqi parties have discussed the idea of limiting/diminishing the powers of the prime minister and vesting some of them in the president, some in a variety of new deputy prime ministers (one for security issues, one for energy and one for economic issues is the most commonly discussed scheme), and some going to restored vice presidents. Other ideas include eliminating the various joint military operations centers, which operate outside the constitutionally-mandated chain of command, and restoring to the president the ability to veto legislation. The basic idea is that if there are more positions with real power, the position of prime minister will not be all-powerful, and therefore the parties will find it easier to strike



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[1] Moreover, it is an exaggeration to claim, as some have, that only Sunnis voted for Iraqiyya and only Shi’ah voted for State of Law. For instance, about one-quarter of Iraqiyya’s parliamentary seats were won by Shi’ah candidates in largely Shi’ah districts.