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Sorting out winners and losers in Iraq

To paraphrase Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's infamous quote about the Army, the United States must now deal with the Iraq it has, not the Iraq it wanted.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published February 15, 2005

Results of the country's historic elections, announced this weekend, suggest Iraq's new government might have closer ties to neighboring Iran than the Bush administration would like.

At the same time, the strong showing by the Kurdish minority means Iraq probably won't end up with the kind of anti-American, Iranian-style theocracy that the White House also dreads.

"This isn't a bad result - it's going to force coalition-building and democratic practices," said Steven A. Cook, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Iraq's Shiite Arabs didn't fare as well as expected. Although they make up 60 percent of the population, they won just 48 percent of the vote and about 51 percent of the seats in the country's new transitional National Assembly.

That will force Shiites to work with Iraq's two other major ethnic groups - Sunni Arabs and non-Arab Kurds - in drafting a permanent constitution acceptable to the country's many factions.

As in most Arab nations, the constitution almost certainly will draw on Islam as a source of laws and legislation.

Even President Bush has acknowledged that Arab democracies "will have to be homegrown and take a lot more religion into the package - and that doesn't mean the Christian religion," said Rosemary Hollis, head of the Middle East Program at London's Chatham House.

But, she adds, "Shiites have divisions among themselves - not all of them are in favor of theocracy." Moreover, Iraq's secular Kurds have made it clear they won't stand for an Islamic government in which clerics rule the country and women have fewer rights than men.

The election also marks the decline in fortunes of a pro-American politician and the rise of another political leader with purported ties to Iran.

A party headed by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi - a White House favorite - garnered only 14 percent of the vote. Many Kurds and Shiites have complained that the burly, hot-tempered Allawi has a thuggish quality reminiscent of Saddam Hussein.

Allawi "was never popular among Iraqis," said Said Hakki, a former staff physician at Bay Pines VA Medical Center who now is president of Iraq's Red Crescent Society. "If you review (poll results) from April 2004, he was next to zero."

In the runup to the election, Hakki said, Allawi made many promises voters were skeptical he could keep. Among them: university scholarships and pledges to put all former members of Hussein's Baath Party back to work.

A strong candidate to replace Allawi is Dr. Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shiite who is virtually unknown in the United States but ranks as one of the most popular figures in Iraq. Head of the Dawa Party, Iraq's oldest Shiite party, he was among the first exiled leaders to return to Iraq after the 2003 invasion and has since reached out to Sunnis and other minorities.

Jaafari is backed by Iraq's most popular leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. On the downside, as far as the White House is concerned, he spent part of his exile years in Iran and is said by detractors to retain shadowy ties to that country.

Were Jaafari to become prime minister, some fear Iraq could tilt toward Iran at a time when U.S.-Iranian relations are even worse than usual because of Iran's purported development of nuclear weapons.

Cook, though, said it's only logical that the two countries have ties, given their proximity and their large Shiite populations.

"In post-war Iraq, you're not going to find that there's no Iranian influence in Iraq - the Iraqis are on their doorstep," he said. "And it's unrealistic to think that no Iraqi politician is going to have some kind of dealings with the Iranians."

Working against Iranian influence, however, are memories of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s as well as the fact that Iraq's Shiites are Arabs, not Persians like their counterparts across the border.

"At the superficial level, yes, you now have a Shiite majority in power in Iraq, but Iraq is not going the way of Iran," Cook said.

Among the biggest election winners were the Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of Iraq's population but won 26 percent of the assembly seats. They will use their clout to ensure that the three Kurdish-controlled provinces of northern Iraq remain relatively autonomous.

The Kurds also won control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which lies outside the Kurdish zone. Driven from Kirkuk during Hussein's "Arabization" campaign, Kurds have returned in large numbers since 2003 to reclaim what they consider part of their homeland even though it also includes thousands of Arabs and Turkmen.

The Kurdish resettlement drive has exacerbated ethnic tensions in Kirkuk and strained relations between the United States and Turkey, Iraq's neighbor to the north. Turkish leaders fear the Kurds want Kirkuk's oil wealth to fuel an independence drive that could inspire Turkey's own 15-million rebellious Kurds.

On Monday, U.S. troops braced for possible violence in Kirkuk, while Turkey called for an investigation into what it said were skewed election results in the city.

"The Turks have been traumatized by their own experience with violent Kurdish nationalism, so they're doing what they can - putting as much diplomatic pressure as possible on the United States and Iraqi Kurds," Cook said.

While many Kurds freely admit they would like their own country, they are also realistic about the obstacles to achieving it even if they managed to control Kirkuk's oil riches. An independent Kurdistan would be a landlocked country with no way of getting its oil to foreign markets without going through the hostile neighboring territories of Turkey, Iran and Syria - or even Sunni areas of Iraq.

"Obviously, geography is playing against a declaration of independence," Cook said. "Kurdish leaders know that, but at the same time you can't discount the desire among Kurds for independence."

For anyone trying to draw definitive conclusions from Iraq's election results, Hollis of Chatham House has this caveat:

"There are no easy things to define here," she said, "so those members of the U.S. and European public who want to understand this in a nutshell get very frustrated with Iraq because it is so complex."

--Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 15, 2005, 01:17:05]