sites in Baghdad. ..... elite level, the result of which has been a wholesale paralysis ... What this tells us is that w
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Post Occupation Iraq: The Brittleness of Political Institutions Adeed Dawisha, Public Policy
Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center and Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Miami University, Ohio
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The winter of Arab discontent, which began with one macabre act of self-sacrifice by a Tunisian street vendor in December 2010, was characterized by massive and widespread demonstrations, protests, and riots against entrenched Arab authoritarian regimes. By the spring of 2012, these uprisings had succeeded in kicking out of office the dictators of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, who between them had amassed no less than 126 years of autocratic rule. Another dictator, that of Syria, who along with his father had ruled the country for over 40 years, is mounting a homicidal assault on his own people in a relentless and bloody civil war. In all of these eruptions, the people were of one voice, demanding an end to the seemingly endless Arab authoritar-
ian malaise and the institution of democratic structures, to be spearheaded by elections that for the first time in decades would be free and fair. As in other Arab countries, mass demonstrations did make an appearance in Iraq, but these were comparatively small and lacked the staying power of the ones that had toppled regimes and/or plunged countries into bloodshed. What distinguished the protests in Iraq was the nature of their declared goals, in which the demands for free elections and fresh faces that had defined the uprisings in other Arab countries were almost absent. And this was hardly surprising; the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had been in power for less than six years, having been put there by the Iraqis themselves in two free and fair elections in December 2005 and March 2010. If the protestors were demonstrating about anything, it was the abysmal performance of the freely elected Maliki government
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Director Dr. Haleh Esfandiari Assistants Kendra Heideman Mona Youssef Special thanks Special thanks to Kendra Heideman and Mona Youssef for coordinating and editing this publication; Joanna Abdallah for editing assistance; Diana Micheli for designing the Occasional Paper Series; and David Hawxhurst for taking the photograph.
The Middle East Program was launched in February 1998 in light of increased U.S. engagement in the region and the profound changes sweeping across many Middle Eastern states. In addition to spotlighting day-to-day issues, the Program concentrates on long-term economic, social, and political developments, as well as relations with the United States. The Middle East Program draws on domestic and foreign regional experts for its meetings, conferences, and occasional papers. Conferences and meetings assess the policy implications of all aspects of developments within the region and individual states; the Middle East’s role in the international arena; American interests in the region; the threat of terrorism; arms proliferation; and strategic threats to and from the regional states. The Program pays special attention to the role of women, youth, civil society institutions, Islam, and democratic and autocratic tendencies. In addition, the Middle East Program hosts meetings on cultural issues, including contemporary art and literature in the region. • Current Affairs: The Middle East Program emphasizes analysis of current issues and their implications for long-term developments in the region, including: the events surrounding the uprisings of 2011 in the Middle East and its effect on economic, political and social life in countries in the region, the increased use of social media, the role of youth, PalestinianIsraeli diplomacy, Iran’s political and nuclear ambitions, the drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and their effect on the region, human rights violations, globalization, economic and political partnerships, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. • Gender Issues: The Middle East Program devotes considerable attention to the role of women in advancing civil society and to the attitudes of governments and the clerical community toward women’s rights in the family and society at large. The Program examines employment patterns, education, legal rights, and political participation of women in the region. The Program also has a keen interest in exploring women’s increasing roles in conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction activities. • Islam, Democracy and Civil Society: The Middle East Program monitors the growing demand of people in the region for the transition to democratization, political participation, accountable government, the rule of law, and adherence by their governments to international conventions, human rights, and women’s rights. It continues to examine the role of Islamic movements and the role of Islamic parties in shaping political and social developments and the variety of factors that favor or obstruct the expansion of civil society. The following paper is based on the author’s presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on February 15, 2012. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect those of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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in providing basic services, particularly a regular supply of electricity. In addition, protesters decried the seeming impotence of parliament in discharging its democratic functions, to say nothing of the pervasive corruption in which governmental and elected officials seemed to be mired. Not that the Maliki government would be characterized as the standard bearer of democratic practices for the rest of the Arabs, nor was Maliki himself a paragon of democratic virtue. But the point here is that protestors in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere were putting their lives on the line to get the very rights that Iraqis had already obtained after the ouster of Saddam Hussein and had used in freely choosing their political representatives. When asked about the demonstrations in Iraq, a female college student from the Sunni province of al-Anbar, who was not particularly enamored with the Shiite-dominated Maliki government, grudgingly conceded that the protests did prove the existence of “a small part of democracy.” After all, she would admit, “when Saddam was here, not even one Iraqi could go out in protest because he would be killed.”1 Still, “a small part of democracy” is hardly a ringing endorsement of Iraq’s political system. While the people of Iraq had no argument with the conduct of the electoral process, it was clear that by the spring and summer of 2011 they had become less sanguine about their leaders’ embrace of democratic values and practices. What Iraqis discovered was that putting someone in office democratically is one thing; getting him to behave democratically was another thing altogether. The fidelity of the prime minister to democracy, and to the notions of compromise and concession that are essential elements of democratic practices, seemed fickle at best. Time and time again, Maliki seemed to consider the system of checks and balances not as an essential element of democracy, but as an irritant political imposition that he would gladly discard or circumvent. And this attitude should not have come as a surprise. Iraq’s prime minister could hardly be said to have been immersed in the kind of political culture that would prepare him to be a true democratic leader. Indeed his political life points to the contrary: he reached political maturation under the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s procrustean autocracy, became a member of a clandestine and hierarchical Islamist Shiite party, and then spent a life of exile with the mullahs of Iran and in Syria under the Assad tyrannical dynasty—a knee-jerk democrat, Iraq’s prime minister was not.
The Iraqi Elections Maliki’s rather warped view of democracy became evident immediately after the results of the 2010 general elections were announced. The 2010 elections and its eye-opening results cannot be understood without an appreciation of the political developments in Iraq since the forcible ouster of Saddam Hussein. Throughout the country’s history, a Sunni Arab minority (about 20 percent of the population) had monopolized political power over a Shiite Arab majority (around 60 percent) and a non-Arab Kurdish community that inhabited the mountainous north and constituted some 17 percent of the population. The dominance of the Sunnis attained an emphatic and violent character under Saddam Hussein’s regime that included genocidal assaults against the Kurds and Shiites. As a result of the opening of the political space after Saddam’s ouster and the eruption of ethnosectarian tensions and violence, the first general election that occurred in December 2005 produced a quintessentially sectarian vote. Shiites voted for Shiite parties, Sunnis voted for Sunni parties, and Kurds voted for Kurdish parties. The only party that espoused non-sectarian and non-ethnic attitudes, al-Iraqiya under the leadership of the fiercely secular Ayad Allawi, was handed a drubbing in the elections, receiving no more than eight percent of the National Assembly seats. Maliki, who belonged to the Dawa party, a member of the Shiite coalition that won almost half of the parliamentary seats, became prime minister and spent the first two years of his tenure beholden to the other powerful figures in the Shiite coalition.2 After a terrorist bombing of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest mosques in February 2006, a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites erupted, turning the country into a bloody and lawless land where the government could do little to protect citizens. By the end of 2007, Maliki had become the butt of criticisms domestically and from abroad. He was belittled for being weak and ineffectual, and for being totally beholden to various Shiite groups and their grandees. But things would change starting in the spring of 2008. Having witnessed the success of the Americans in subduing the Sunni insurgency through overwhelming force and by coaxing the Sunni tribes away from al-Qaeda, Maliki decided to take on the Shiite Mahdi Army and its leader, the young firebrand cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. The Mahdi Army had established political and security control over a large swath of Shiite areas, including the port city of Basra, Iraq’s third larg-
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 Table 1: Results of the 2010 Parliamentary Elections Party/Coalition
# of votes 2010/2005
% of total 2010/2005
Seats 2010
Iraqiya
2,849,612/977,325
24.72/8.0
91
SOL
2,792,083
24.22
89
Shiite Alliances
2,092,066/5,166,165
18.15/42.5
70
Sunni Parties
604,873/2,340,209
5.25/19.2
10
Kurdish Parties
2,554,442/2,799,860
22.16/23.0
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est city, and the Baghdad neighborhood, of Sadr City, home to over two million Shiites. In March, Iraqi security forces, backed by American and British air power and logistical support, launched a massive attack on the Mahdi Army in Basra, and by May they had taken control of the city and established a measure of normalcy. Before long the pattern was repeating itself in other Shiites towns and areas in the south. But perhaps Maliki’s biggest success was defeating the Mahdi Army in Sadr City, when over 10,000 government troops would enter the Shiite neighborhood, bringing a calm not seen for a number of years. The state’s victory over lawless paramilitary groups brought Maliki much kudos among the population. Taking heart from the widespread popularity that came on the heels of the newly-found assertiveness of the state and its institutions, Maliki formed his own party, calling it the State of the Law (SOL). He denounced sectarianism and advocated a vigorous espousal of Iraqi nationalism. Maliki’s dramatic transformation from sectarian to nationalist, from weak to strong, would bear fruits in the 2009 local elections. Seen as the person responsible for bringing back the authority of the state, the voters would vote heavily for the SOL, particularly in Shiite areas. The results showed that the SOL garnered more votes than any other electoral entity in no fewer than 9 of the 14 provinces that held elections (the three Kurdish provinces of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok, as well as the disputed province of Kirkuk, did not hold local elections). No wonder that Maliki and his party would go into the March 7, 2010 general elections confident of victory. He expected to get enough votes to be able to dictate coalition terms or even, with a bit of luck, to squeeze through with an outright majority. But to his surprise (and to the surprise of others), it soon became clear that the final outcome was
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genuinely in doubt. In many ways, this uncertainty affirmed the steps Iraq had taken on the path to democracy. Adam Przeworski reminds us: “the process of establishing democracy is a process of institutionalizing uncertainty… it is within the nature of democracy that no one’s interests can be guaranteed.”3 The uncertain result carried on throughout the election and the vote counting, finally producing an outcome that would come to haunt Maliki and astound many observers (see table 1). The winner this time around was the secular al-Iraqiya, which had been trounced four years earlier, but which this time was able to muster 25 percent of the vote. Maliki and his State of Law Party finished a close second, and the new Shiite grouping, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), placed third, garnering less than half of what its earlier incarnation had received in the 2005 election. Not only the political leaders, but the near 80 percent of sitting parliamentarians whom the voters sent packing, had learned their first hard lesson in what democracy can really mean. The voters were making a point that they no longer would blindly follow their sectarian instincts, that they would choose representatives whom they thought were the best qualified for the job, and that they intended to hold their leaders accountable. A New York Times headline, “The Iraqi voter rewrites the rulebook,”4 summed up the new sentiment. While the Iraqi voters showed a political maturity that augured well for the country’s progress toward democracy, the aftermath would show that serious deficits still remained. Immediately after the results were announced, it became clear that the increasingly discriminating Iraqi voters would be thwarted by the self-interested machinations of politicians. Regardless of the results, political leaders gave the impression that their commitment to democracy was contingent
on democracy serving their own interests. To many of these leaders, it seemed that the only acceptable offspring of the electoral process was the office of the prime minister, not that of the opposition leader.
Maliki’s Authoritarian Proclivities Foremost among those leaders who thought of “opposition” as another term for failure was the sitting prime minister himself. With his authoritarian roots coming to the fore, Maliki simply would not accept the final result of the election that placed him second to Allawi and his secular al-Iraqiya. He dismissed the results, vowing to sue and airing his plans to form a new government as the “real” winner. In response to these hysterics, the electoral committee and independent observers vouched for the fairness of the process. But Maliki would not let it go; he very well knew that according to the constitution, the president of the Republic was obliged to ask the winner of the elections to form a government. So, he blatantly used the power of his office to cajole the courts to come up with a decision ordering a manual recount. Just in case the recount ploy did not work, Maliki used the same strong arm tactics to pressure the supreme federal court to come up with a constitutional interpretation favorable to Maliki. Basically, the judges decreed that even though al-Iraqiya came out first, it would forfeit its right to form a government if other parties formed themselves into an alliance with a larger combined total of seats. Al-Iraqiya, of course, cried foul, challenging the interpretation and even the jurisdiction of the court. But Ayad Allawi, al-Iraqiya’s leader, had been hoodwinked and completely outmaneuvered by the relentless Maliki. The prime minister scurried around trying to find partners, making all kinds of opportunistic promises and concessions. While rumors flew of impending mergers with Sunnis and Shiites, and with large and small groups, the most obvious partner remained the INA. With all his talk of Iraqi nationalism, Maliki remained a closet sectarian at heart, motivated first and foremost by his Shiite identity. Indeed, it was Moqtada al-Sadr, who could not forget Maliki’s dismantling of the Mahdi Army, who initially blocked the merger. After more than three months of negotiations and concessions by Maliki, al-Sadr relented and a new Shiite alliance under Maliki’s leadership was formed.
Now as the head of the largest bloc, which was only a few seats short of an overall majority, Maliki was set to form a government. However, in order to govern, Maliki knew that he needed a larger coalition that had to include the Kurds. The two pivotal Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president, and Masoud Barazani, the president of the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, insisted on a national unity government of all political players, including al-Iraqiya and its leader Allawi. In order to break the deadlock, Maliki would eventually accept a proposal creating a parallel executive structure to be headed by Allawi. Called the Council for Strategic Policies (CSP), the structure had vague and undetermined powers, which is probably why after long negotiations Maliki decided to accede to it. In late December 2010, Maliki finally formed a government, more than nine months after the elections— months of political and governmental paralysis that might have proved Maliki’s superior instinct for political drudgery, but would leave the Iraqi population wondering about not just the value of their electoral vote, but the worth of democratic practices in general. The Iraqis’ increasing skepticism of democratic practices and of Maliki’s commitment to democratic ideals did not seem to temper the prime minister’s seemingly ingrained penchant for centralizing power into his office. Immediately upon taking office, he went to work on the hapless supreme federal court, which, for all intents and purposes, Maliki had turned into an arm of the prime ministerial office, to bring a number of institutions under his control. In January 2011, the court ruled that the central bank and various independent committees and commissions that were tasked with overseeing elections, protecting human rights, and fighting corruption be brought under the control of the prime minister. The most egregious of the court’s rulings concerned the Higher Independent Electoral Commission (HIEC), which had fought tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of the elections, and to sabotage Maliki’s various schemes to be declared the winner of the elections. The drafters of the constitution in 2005 were unambiguous in placing the HIEC under the supervision of parliament, but this time the allegedly independent judges, fast becoming Maliki’s minions, outdid themselves. Reverting to what can only be described as legal acrobatics, they came up with a convoluted argument that found attaching the HIEC to the legislative branch of government to be a violation of the separation of powers, and thus decreed that henceforth, the HIEC would be attached to the
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 executive,5 where no doubt it would be easier for Maliki to staff these critical institutions, particularly the “independent” electoral commission with his own cronies. Maliki did not confine his zest for authoritarianism to behind the scenes political intrigue. He was in no way averse to going public with his seemingly ingrained authoritarian proclivities. When in January, a frustrated deputy prime minister, the Sunni Saleh Mutlaq, called Maliki a dictator, the prime minister surrounded his deputy’s house with tanks and demanded that parliament fire him for “lacking faith in the political process.”6 For Maliki to take what essentially was no more than an uncomplimentary comment about his political attitude and practices, and turn it into some kind of a treasonous slander against the country’s political process that necessitated the dispatch of armored tanks, would bring back uncomfortable memories of days gone by when Saddam Hussein would equate, as a matter of course, the Iraqi state with his own person. Mutlaq’s outburst had come after persistent complaints by al-Iraqiya that hundreds of its supporters had been arbitrarily arrested by Maliki’s security forces, detaining them in secret locations, and torturing them to obtain confessions meant to implicate party leaders in terrorist activities and/or planning military coups.7 Indeed, one such “confessions” episode led to the issuing of an arrest warrant on terrorism charges against Iraq’s most senior Sunni politician, the country’s vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi. Al-Hashemi immediately fled to the Kurdish north and declared that he was willing to face justice anywhere but in Baghdad. Maliki would respond with the kind of comparison calculated to persuade Iraqis, particularly the majority Shiites, to perceive Sunni leaders as political pariahs. “We gave Saddam a fair trial,” Maliki said. “And we’ll give Hashemi a fair trial too.”8 The fact that both Mutlaq and al-Hashemi were not just scions of the Sunni community, but senior members of al-Iraqiya did not give Maliki pause to ponder; on the contrary, he behaved as though he unhesitatingly believed they were simply getting their just desserts.
Governments of National Disunity Beyond his own personal proclivities, Maliki’s penchant for political control is also a product of the country’s divided political structure and divisive political culture. From its very beginning, Iraq had been an uneasy mixture of Shiites, Sunnis,
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and Kurds. Whatever steps had been taken to ease these cultural schisms in the early days of the country’s statehood were negated by Saddam’s virulently ethno-sectarian rule, in which Sunnis were favored and the rest mostly oppressed. These existential schisms were exacerbated by political decisions taken during the American occupation, which tried to restore communal balance, but ended up heightening ethno-sectarian consciousness. An important feature of this arrangement was the practice of creating governments of national unity that in retrospect would have been better called governments of national disunity. In order to accommodate every political player, with the hope that everyone would have a stake in the political process, cabinet portfolios, under active American encouragement, were dished out to various groups that had little in common beyond a hunger for power and the largess that comes with it. Ministries became autonomous fiefdoms doing the bidding of ethno-sectarian bosses and warlords, which they did brazenly without trying to cover their tracks. People took to identifying ministries by their ethno-sectarian affiliations—Foreign Affairs was Kurdish, Defense was Sunni, Interior was Shiite, and so on. When a young Shiite, who had lined up in front of the Ministry of the Interior to join the police force but had expressed a preference for soldiering, was asked why he was not applying to the Ministry of Defense, his immediate answer was: “it does not belong to us.”9 Of course the hope was that the 2010 elections, whose results showed the increasing disdain for sectarianism among voters, would produce a strong and coherent government that would be challenged by an equally assertive opposition. But that would not come to pass. The tortuous process of forming a government, which involved sundry promises and concessions by Maliki, produced a government in no way dissimilar from the disastrous ones that preceded it. This time each party was allocated a number of cabinet portfolios, and the party leadership named the eventual occupant. There were so many chips to be cashed that Maliki ended up with a sprawling 45-member cabinet! The multiple loyalties that flowed from such a system led to a fractious cabinet that was unable to reach decisions and formulate policy. It is incomprehensible to many Iraqis (and to others outside the country) that eight years after the demise of Saddam’s rule, in a country whose national annual budgets have topped $80 billion, unemployment stands at more than 25 percent for those under 30; sewage flows freely in the streets and into rivers and lakes, so that, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross,
“access to water of sufficient quality [is] a major challenge for large parts of the population;”10 and electric grids and plants continue to supply just about half of the demand, and even less during the high demand summer season. So what the Iraqis got was a fractured government that more often than not could not reach collective decisions at a time when the country, with its multitude of severe economic, security, and social problems, was in dire need of an activist and a can-do government. Governmental deadlock and paralysis may have been bad for the country but not necessarily for Maliki; it opened the door for Maliki to take political measures and make policy independently of the cabinet, a practice that fit in well with his innate partiality to the centralizing of power in his own hands. A year into Maliki’s premiership, one exasperated senior minister, the well-liked and highly respected Sunni Minister of Finance, Rafi al-Issawi, told the New York Times that Maliki’s behavior in government so far strongly pointed to his intention “to consolidate power more and more.” He then added, “Someone else should be prime minister.”11 Al-Issawi’s annoyance was ignited by Maliki’s seeming cavalier attitude to constitutional issues, particularly ones that defined his relationship with the cabinet. Maliki more often than not would get his way because of the cabinet’s lack of institutional coherence, making it easy for the prime minister to block or disregard policies that he deemed to be against his own interests, or that might place some restraint on his unilateralism. Thus, for example, even though al-Iraqiya and the Kurds agitated from late 2011 onward for a national conference of all parties to discuss initiatives meant to curtail the powers of the prime minister, and even though between them they had no less than 19 cabinet seats, governmental fragmentation was such that Maliki was still able to manipulate divisions within the cabinet to sabotage the idea, delaying it with procedural nit-picking in the hope that it would lose its potency and end up going nowhere. The issues to be discussed in the envisaged national conference were not ones that Maliki would want to even put on the table, let alone discuss. The thorniest issue was the creation of the CSP, which, as we have seen, had been agreed upon in the so-called Irbil Agreement that eventually broke the deadlock over the formation of the cabinet in December 2011. To be headed by Allawi, the CSP was supposed to have some unspecified oversight over cabinet decisions, hardly an issue that Maliki would find palatable. Another item to be discussed in the national conference was for all parties to
agree on a set of by-laws that would regulate cabinet decisionmaking. One would expect any cabinet to push for this, and maybe ministers did; Maliki, however, would see this only as an infringement on his own power. Moreover, al-Iraqiya and the Kurds wanted to discuss the continued absence of ministers heading the ministries of Defense, Interior, and National Security more than 13 months after the formation of government in December 2010. This absurd situation is a feature of governments of “national unity,” where cabinet portfolios are dished out to various groups. Having agreed to these specific apportionments, including granting the Defense portfolio to al-Iraqiya, as a condition for the formation of his cabinet, he spent the following months sabotaging the idea, by refusing all names submitted to him, with hardly any input from his cabinet. The result has been that the ministries are headed by acting ministers, one of them being Maliki himself for the Interior Ministry. The other two acting ministers for Defense and National Security are men whom Maliki is known to easily control. Maliki and his cronies thus have used every single trick in the book to sabotage the idea of a national conference, and in this effort, the cabinet as a decision-making institution has been almost invisible. One reason for the weakness of the cabinet (and by definition the strength of Maliki) was its disperse and large membership—45 ministers in all! It was not that Maliki planned this; it was more a function of trying to form an all-inclusive national unity government. But with so many ministers, belonging to bickering parties and groups, the cabinet naturally would found it difficult to act as a cohesive entity, and this played into the hands of Maliki. Even so, the unwieldy size of the cabinet proved so untenable that, in July 2011, Maliki decided to dispense with about a dozen junior ministers. But the hope that this move would make for more effective governance did not materialize. The national “unity” government would continue on the same course of disunity, populated as it was by fractious parties, themselves suffering from internal tensions and discords.
Political Parties or Incoherent Grouping? If Maliki’s penchant for authoritarianism is one indicator of the brittleness of Iraq’s democratic transition, the weakness of the party system is another. A robust transition needs a stable party system that is delineated by competing parties,
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 whose identities are defined by clearly identifiable ideologies or political platforms. While personalities are important and play a role in solidifying the party’s identity, their influence is constrained by the party’s ideology, its structure, and its institutional rules. Iraq’s problem is that there is not a single party or political group or coalition in post-occupation Iraq that fits the bill. To start with, the ruling coalition headed by Maliki is itself highly fractured. It has had some strange bedfellows. In addition to his own Dawa Party, this Shiite alliance brought under its umbrella the followers of two young clerics, who not only belonged to rival clerical families, but personally held each other in contempt. Nor did either of them respect Maliki’s leadership of the coalition. Like in marriages of convenience, the strained relationship has been prevalent and periodically has burst out in the open. It was not uncommon for one of the clerics, Ammar al-Hakim, to publicly take the side of al-Iraqiya leaders in some dispute with Maliki. The other cleric, the young firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr, seems to have no qualms about conducting his own negotiations with parties outside the coalition and making policy statements without even bothering to consult Maliki. When Maliki seemed open to a renegotiated agreement with the Obama administration about a prolonged American presence in Iraq, it was al-Sadr who put paid to any such possibility by threatening to wage a guerrilla war against the “occupiers.” And when sectarian killing increased and government deadlocked in late 2011, al-Sadr publicly mocked the government’s (and by implication, Maliki’s) performance. Members of his party soon followed with calls for new elections. These were immediately rebuked not only by Maliki, but also by supporters of the other cleric, Ammar al-Hakim.12 Such political brinkmanship and public recriminations that have occurred, and continue to occur, within the ruling coalition can hardly inspire confidence in the ability of the government to act as a problem solving corporate entity. Nor is the secular al-Iraqiya a more cohesive or coherent entity. It is rather a coalition of disparate groups united by the overarching purpose of limiting the power of parties brandishing a Shiite identity. This is why members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, a loose offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, found common cause with Ayad Allawi’s secular Wifaq Movement, deciding to fight the 2010 elections under al-Iraqiya banner. Moreover, the various parties that came together to form al-Iraqiya under Allawi’s leadership themselves hardly had clearly enunciated political programs
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or ideologies. Very much like the Shiite parties, what defined the constituent groups that made up al-Iraqiya were the leaders around whom they coalesced. Allawi therefore was not the acknowledged head of a coherent political party; rather, he was more like the titular chief of a loose confederation of various tribes each with its own leader. Therefore, it did not take long after the elections for the bond that had tied these groups together during the electoral campaign and the ensuing negotiations over the formation of government to loosen. Some groups extracted themselves completely. Mainly Shiite al-Iraqiya members from the south of Iraq left the coalition and formed a new entity with the name White Iraqiya. Others remained within al-Iraqiya, but operated in a limbo land, continuing to swear fidelity to the organization, but acting independently, and sometimes against the dictates of the leadership. This became obvious in late 2011 and early 2012 when in response to the government’s arrest warrant against Tariq al-Hashimi, the country’s vice president and leader of the Tajdid (Renewal) group within al-Iraqiya, the coalition announced that it is boycotting parliament and the cabinet. Initially, all the constituent elements of the coalition took heed of the leadership decision. But soon after, this unity of purpose made way for an assertion of personal interest. Parliamentary members of alIraqiya belonging to the faction led by parliament’s speaker Usama al-Nujaifi began to be seen in the corridors of parliament. Others would soon join, particularly those from the al-Hall (Solution) bloc. Nor was there unanimous support for boycotting the cabinet. One or two ministers did indeed break the boycott and attended cabinet meetings.13 In the face of a splintering coalition, and having achieved next to nothing, al-Iraqiya finally decided in late January 2012 to call off its boycott.
A Do-Little Parliament Not that al-Iraqiya’s boycott impacted the performance of either the cabinet or the parliament. As mentioned earlier, the cabinet of national unity usually performed in segmented patterns where there was little whole to the parts. So the failure to attend cabinet meetings by a couple or so ministers would have little impact on the process of policy making, except for allowing Maliki to avoid collective decision-making, and to give him a broader vista for the individual exercise of political
power. Neither was parliament a shining example of democratic activism. In the March 2010 elections, the people of Iraq delivered what democrats in Iraq and abroad had hoped for. New faces constituted more than 80 percent of the membership of the new parliament; many of them elected on merit rather than on blind sectarianism, and almost all promised to serve the Iraqi “nation,” eschewing the narrow particularistic interests that had paralyzed the work of their predecessors. It did not take long for the Iraqi people to recognize what a pipe dream that was. On the one hand, parliamentarians from Maliki’s al-Dawa, behaved as though their only role was to thwart any parliamentary initiative undertaken by al-Iraqiya. On the other hand, al-Iraqiya members spent much of their time complaining and boycotting sessions; their main lament being Maliki’s unwillingness to deliver on the Council for Strategic Policies (CSP), the parallel institution to the cabinet that had been promised to Ayad Allawi in the negotiations over the formation of government that took place in the Kurdish city of Irbil in the fall of 2010. It seemed that to al-Iraqiya, paralyzing the work of parliament was not too high a price to pay for the higher purpose of getting the CSP position for its leader. And in the midst of these antagonisms, the Kurdish parties received the applause of the multitude for assuming the role of mediator trying to preserve Iraq, but, in fact, they did this only to maintain the special treatment and the wealth of political and economic privileges that have come their way since 2003. Parliament did on occasions eschew petty differences and assert its constitutional powers vis-à-vis the executive. For example, it did not comply with Maliki’s request in late 2011 to have his deputy prime minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq fired, nor did it accede to Maliki’s intense pressure to have the appointment of the head of the integrity commission moved from parliament to the prime minister’s office. But such acts of parliamentary independence and assertiveness were few and far in between. Generally, the institution achieved little primarily because political deadlock afflicted its internal workings. No wonder, therefore, that lethargy would ensue, and a parliament that many had hoped would be characterized by vigorous debates and a vibrant legislative agenda, ended up, after the passing of not many months, with little to show for its exertions, anemic as they were. After all, time after time, the two-thirds quorum was barely attained, and sometimes not reached at all, and
members went on extended breaks while important legislation was shelved.
A Culture of Corruption The political deadlock that pervaded the institutions of governance at the ministerial and parliamentary levels would inevitably infect the bureaucracy. With little or no direction from decision-making authorities, the bureaucracy could hardly implement policies that did not exist. So rather than be the vigorous administrators of a young and vibrant democratic state, Iraqi bureaucrats would behave no differently from other Arab bureaucrats famed for their indolence, incompetence, and corruption. Indeed, corruption would become endemic at every level of Iraq’s government. In its 2011 rankings, Transparency International, a civil society organization based in Berlin that publishes an annual index of global corruption, endowed Iraq with the dubious distinction of being placed in the “highly corrupt” category, ranking it 175th out of 183 countries.14 Since thousands of the present crop of Iraqi officials seem to have used forged educational documents and certificates to obtain their present positions,15 it hardly could have come as a surprise that they would slot neatly and effortlessly into money-making and influence peddling practices. Regardless of where responsibility lay for this sad and troubling development in Iraq’s fortunes, what the country ended up with was a double-whammy of official malevolence. Whether in high or low positions, these officials not only would not contribute much to the building of robust and purposeful institutions, they in fact behaved like parasitic entities, treating public service merely as an opportunity to milk the system for what it is worth.
The Crystallization of Sectarian Discord This culture of opportunism and venality, of getting what you can for yourself and your cronies while you are in a position of influence, no matter how short-lived, would feed into, and in many ways solidify, the gathering fragmentation and immobility of government. The ensuing political deadlock, imbued with bitter denunciations and recriminations, was bad enough. What made it worse was that it was played
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 against the backdrop of mounting violence. As the date for the departure of American troops, scheduled for the end of 2011, approached, the security situation began to deteriorate. As though intent on testing the capability of Iraq’s security forces, now increasingly operating on their own, with Americans mostly in peripheral supporting capacity, al-Qaeda operatives began to escalate their bombing campaign. It was obvious that to al-Qaeda militants, the Shiite political order was as despicable and unacceptable as the American occupying forces. After a hiatus of some seven months in the spring and summer of 2011, al-Qaeda launched a series of bombing campaigns in central and southern Iraq. In a four-month period spanning August 2011 to January 2012, a wave of suicide bombings killed some 350 Iraqis and wounded over 700. While most of the attacks targeted southern Shiite cities and districts in Baghdad that were predominantly Shiite, al-Qaeda also saved some of its venom for Sunni areas and cities, which after 2007 had decided to no longer wage jihad against Iraq’s central authorities. Indeed, one of the suicide attackers blew himself up in the main hall of the Umm alQura mosque, one of the most important Sunni religious sites in Baghdad. It was suspected that he was targeting a Sunni judge known for his anti-militant views. The lawmaker survived, but 32 innocent worshippers were killed and another 39 seriously wounded. Regardless of the motives, the killings in Shiite and Sunni areas intensified the sense of fear and mistrust among both communities, leading to reports of Sunni and Shiite families leaving their homes to settle in segregated districts.16 This was a disturbing development that inevitably brought back memories of the dark days of 2006-2007 when some two and a half million people left their homes, neighborhoods, and cities, seeking security among their co-religionists, in large waves of cross migration. Internal displacement left a city such as Baghdad, famed for its multi-cultural ethos, where people intermingled freely and easily, divided along ethno-sectarian lines. Sectarian violence and mounting suspicions and mistrust on the street level fed into an atmosphere of gathering paranoia at the political elite level, which was peppered by claims of plots, conspiracies, and intrigue. The Sunnis, residing in the middle of Iraq and feeling highly sensitive about their minority status, to which they were still unaccustomed, continued to make shrill, but on the whole not particularly substantiated, warnings about Iran’s irredentist designs on Iraq. The accusations varied from sightings of
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Iranian Revolutionary Guards advising and training Ministry of Interior personnel, to Maliki himself allegedly doing the bidding of his supposed Iranian handlers.17 Hardly any evidence was presented, but, then in a political milieu, where an abundance of suspicion and mistrust prevails, such silly things as evidence hardly come to mind. Sunni neurosis about Iran’s political power in Iraq was more than replicated by Shiite fear of residual Baathist presence in Iraq. Maliki himself suffers from what can only be described as Baathist phobia. He has spoken alarmingly more than once of Baathist (and by implication Sunni) plots against him personally and the Shiite political order generally. In October 2011, Maliki’s government apparently received information from the new, post-Qadhafi, Libyan leaders that former Baathists and members of Saddam Hussein military were plotting a military coup against the Maliki government. Within days, more than 200 people were arrested, and by November the figure had gone up to over 600. To say that due process was lacking is an understatement, with many who had the slightest connection with the Baath Party being pulled out of their beds in the middle of the night. What was more egregious was that in addition to the mass arrests for this alleged conspiracy, Maliki’s government went on a witch hunt against former Baathists now teaching in Iraqi universities, firing around 150 university professors. While howls of protest erupted from Sunni politicians, Maliki’s Shiite coalition partners endorsed the government action, and at the forefront of these was Moqtada al-Sadr, who explained that the dismissal of the professors was “good for us and good for them.”18 One did not have to wonder who constituted the “us” and “them.” And this came from a man who, of all the Shiite leaders, had tirelessly portrayed himself as a paragon of non-sectarian nationalism, supposedly fighting Americans for the sake of all Iraqis, and on many occasions siding with Sunni politicians against the Shiite prime minister. But political posturing and opportunism aside, when primordial instinct came to the fore, al-Sadr would revert to the Shiite “us,” which would frame the attitudinal distinction from “them,” the Sunnis. Such was the deepening sectarian mindset among Iraq’s ruling elites.
New Calls for Ethnosectarian Federalism The result of the growing distance between communities, and the proclivity of these communities to be entrenched in seg-
regated areas, has given rise to increasing calls from existing provinces and even districts within these provinces for shifting power away from Baghdad to the regions, thus creating a federal structure that extends beyond the Kurdish domain to the rest of the country. Indeed, from the very beginning of the effort to build a democratic Iraq, there was almost universal consensus that transforming Iraq’s communal diversity into an agent of positive change would be achieved best through federalism.19 This political and administrative system is ideal for fractured societies as it cuts across cleavages, giving all groups a stake in the system. The federalism that had been envisaged for Iraq after the fall of Saddam was one that would be decentralized on the basis of territory, not ethnicity or sect, where local governments would have responsibility for all citizens in their areas, not just for ethnic or sectarian co-nationals.20 The recommendation was to maintain Iraq’s administrative structure under Saddam, in which the country was divided into 18 units, but to give these 18 units far greater powers vis-à-vis the center. What transpired, however, was a tug of war between groups that insisted on the inviolability of existing state structures, which meant the preservation of centralized rule, and other groups that advocated a federalism that is based not on territoriality but on ethnosectarianism. The Kurds, who of all Iraq’s diverse groups had the most sharpened sense of national identity, and had suffered immeasurably at the hands of various Iraqi governments, were the most vocal supporters of the latter option. Immediately after toppling Saddam and the Baathists in 2003, the Kurds embarked on a relentless and ultimately successful national and international campaign to create an autonomous Kurdistan, constitutive of three overwhelmingly Kurdish-speaking governorates. At the other pole were the Sunnis who were adamant about preserving the political and administrative unity of Iraq by keeping power in the center. In between these poles resided the Shiites, most preferring a united centralized Iraq, but some, with time, casting envious glances at the successful Kurdish experiment. The seeming entrenchment, indeed heightening, of sectarian attitudes, plus the autocratic predispositions of Maliki and his sectarian impulses led to a proliferation of Iraqi districts requesting (and some demanding) federal status. The constitution at the insistence of the Kurds had made it easy for provinces to seek autonomous status for themselves within Iraq, or to merge with other provinces to form federal regions. The requirement is simply for one-third of the pro-
vincial council to submit a request to the central government in Baghdad to hold a referendum on the issue in the province. Indeed, the southern Shiite province of Basra, with its huge reserves of petroleum, had already submitted such a request that was quietly shelved by the Maliki government. There was really no political or ideological purpose to the request of the Shiite province; it was motivated simply by economic and financial considerations, since Basra felt that it was not getting a fair share of the financial returns from the oil under its own soil. The province received a special dispensation of $1 per barrel for the oil produced from its own province at a time when a barrel of petroleum was being sold on the international market for around $100. Basra’s action, coming from a Shiite province in a country, which after centuries was now ruled by a Shiite majority, did produce some raised eyebrows. But in late 2011, calls for autonomous federal status came from an even more unlikely source. The provincial councils of the Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salah al-Din made public their intention to become autonomous districts. The surprise here was that the Sunnis had been the most virulent and vociferous opponents of federalism, insisting on maintaining the political integrity of a unified Iraq governed by a strong central authority. Moreover, unlike Shiite Basra, the two Sunni provinces hardly were awash with economic resources. Obviously, the purpose here was primarily political, spurred by a sense of political marginalization and a belief that Sunnis were being harassed and treated unfairly, and that this state of affairs was likely to worsen in the future. Not long after, Diyala, another Sunnimajority province joined in with its own request to become an autonomous district. While the constitution enjoins the central government to respond quickly, within 15 days, to such provincial requests, the Maliki government has dragged its feet on the issue, almost challenging the provinces to take the matter to the Supreme Court, which, as the provinces well knew, had been acting as an arm of Maliki’s government. Indeed, asked in a press interview about the requests by Shiite and Sunni governorates for federal status, Maliki responded: “We will not allow the creation of federal regions.”21 Given that this statement was in complete contradiction of the constitution, it was not clear which, and how many, political institutions were included in the “We” designation, or maybe it was the royal “WE.” If the brittleness of Iraq’s political institutions was manifest in the country’s sectarian divisions between Arab Sunnis
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 and Arab Shiites, the tension between the central government and the ethnically distinct Kurds to the north, brought about by the political and economic arrangements won by the Kurds in the early years after Saddam’s demise, was no less palpable. In addition to their fair share of political influence in Iraq’s government, which included such choice positions as the presidency of the republic and the ministries of foreign affairs, trade, and health, among others, the Kurds, alone among the various communities, had their own autonomous region of Kurdistan, with the city of Irbil as the capital and seat of government. The region boasted an elected president and parliament, as well as an army of its own that numbered more than 100,000 men. In addition, Kurdistan formulated its own constitution, which, in case of a constitutional dispute, would take precedence over Iraq’s federal constitution. This constitutional injunction was particularly worrisome to Arab Iraqis, since the Kurdish constitution defined Kurdistan as containing not only the agreed upon three provinces of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok, but also palpable chunks of real estate in the non-Kurdish provinces of Nineveh, Diyala, Salah al-Din, and most critically the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the province of Ta’mim. Relations between Baghdad and the Kurds have been particularly strained over Kirkuk, where thousands of Iraqi and Kurdish troops face each other along the boundary that separates Kurdistan from Arab Iraq. Indeed, occasional clashes had erupted in the past but were prevented from escalating into large-scale fighting by the presence of American troops. With that stabilizing force no longer there, Kirkuk could very well become even more of an incendiary issue in Iraqi-Kurdish relations. Kirkuk’s importance transcends the issue of geographic irredentism; it is the focal point of a much larger dispute over oil production and marketing that relates to the competing rights of regions vis-à-vis the central government. The issue is whether the government of Kurdistan can enter into exploration agreements of oil with foreign companies independently of Baghdad. Not that the Kurds have waited for a legal resolution of the problem. They have gone ahead and signed contracts with over 40 foreign companies, turning a blind eye to fierce Iraqi objections and denunciations. Baghdad has consistently argued that all contracts signed with the Kurdish government without the approval of the central government were illegal. Baghdad does stand on thin ground, however, because a hydrocarbon law meant to resolve constitutional ambiguities that had led to the Iraqi Kurdish oil disputes
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remains bogged down in Iraq’s fractious parliament. In the meantime, Baghdad continued to threaten the oil companies prospecting in Kurdistan with exclusion from competing for contracts for the much larger oil fields in the south. In reality, these were all hollow threats; the companies prospecting in Kurdistan were too small to go against the big hitters of the oil market, such as Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil, who were the main contenders in the south, and who had not entered the Kurdistan market for fear of Iraqi retaliation. The big bombshell that would make this fraught relationship between Baghdad and Irbil even more precarious came in November 2011, when an advisor to the Kurdish government said that after months of negotiations, a deal was struck with ExxonMobil to explore six blocks of oil fields in Kurdistan. For Exxon, Kurdistan presented an opportunity for a very lucrative future. While at present, the Kurdish fields account for less than 10 percent of Iraq’s oil production, the region’s reserves are enormous, estimated at about 45 billion barrels of oil and between three and six trillion cubic feet of gas. Moreover, the petroleum is close to the ground and therefore inexpensive to produce, as well as being of high quality, and as such cheap to refine. And getting in at the beginning, the company was able to secure from the Kurdish government a generous profit sharing agreement, in contrast to the Iraqi government who paid prospecting companies a service fee of less than $2 per barrel, the lowest in the world.22 On their part, the Iraqis fumed about the deal, but initially issued a somewhat vague response. A statement coming from Hussein al-Shahristani, the Deputy Prime Minister for Energy, in charge of the petroleum industry, said, “The Iraqi government will deal with any company that violates the law the same way it dealt with similar companies before.”23 It was not clear which law al-Shahristani was referring to, since parliament had not discussed, let alone voted on, a hydrocarbon law. Moreover, ExxonMobil had already agreed to invest some $50 billion in the southern oil field of West Qurna-1 that would more than triple its present production level of 2 million barrel per day by 2015. And Exxon was pretty confident that Iraqis well knew that there are very few companies that could put on the table that kind of capital, to say nothing of Exxon’s unrivaled technical expertise. Still, Baghdad continued with its ultimatum for Exxon to withdraw from Kurdistan. Baghdad did possess a powerful trump card that allowed it to persist in threatening the American multinational. Exxon
faced fierce competition for Iraq’s oil, but that did not come from the usual suspects, the big oil and gas multinationals. It came from state-owned companies in China, Russia, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, and Malaysia, etc. These companies, particularly China’s National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), were not going to be dissuaded by the paltry return on investment that Baghdad was offering. Unlike the multinationals, profit was not their only goal; they were just as, if not more, interested in long-term access to Iraqi oil. For example, CNPC’s aggressive bidding in Iraq was motivated as much by long-term economic security concerns as by financial profits. The Iraqis therefore were able to deliver on their threat when they announced on February 13, 2012 that Exxon would be barred from future bidding on new Iraqi southern fields. Iraq might be able to dissuade companies and get them to tow the Iraqi line, but any success against the companies had little chance of being replicated in the case of the autonomous Kurdish government. That separate Kurdish deals with foreign oil companies would continue and expand was made very clear by Barham Saleh, the prime minister of the Kurdish government. He defended Kurdistan’s right to strike such deals, independently of Baghdad, as a national necessity for survival. “There is no way that we will be dissuaded from our constitutional right to developing our resources and allow ourselves to be hostages to the whims of some bureaucrats in Baghdad,” Saleh said defiantly. “We’ve been there before. Oil was used to strangle our people, to commit genocide.”24 There is no stronger statement than this one to illustrate the distance already taken by the Kurds in their quest for political autonomy that at times seems to be moving slowly, yet with sure resolve, along the path of national independence. In the days immediately after the toppling of Saddam’s dictatorship, federalism was touted as the administrative structure best suited to a stable, peaceful, and prosperous Iraq. But that was a federal model that avoided inordinate emphasis on ethnic and sectarian solidarities that tend to generate conflict. What has transpired is a different, almost polar, kind of federalism. The present conception of federalism that is intellectually and operationally pitted against the notion of a politically centralized Iraq is one that is stirred by sharpened awareness of fissiparous ethnic and sectarian identity, and fed in most cases by the promise of increased riches for the region at the expense of the rest of the country. This kind of
exclusive and centrifugal federalism can only but add to the brittleness of Iraq’s political institutions.
Eclipse of the Democratic Idea? This brittleness, manifested in the prime minister’s increasing arbitrariness, in a weak and divided cabinet, in the fragmentation of the party system, in parliament’s lack of purpose and direction, in mounting ethnosectarian conflicts and schisms that have been reflected in petty disputes and jealousies at the elite level, the result of which has been a wholesale paralysis in decision-making—all these deficits and dysfunctions have inevitably and sadly made people question the utility of democracy. Iraqi citizens did, after all, go to the polls in 2010 and deliver a verdict that eschewed sectarianism and punished incompetence. They brought in new faces and personalities who were supposed to usher in a new and vigorous stage in the country’s journey toward the kind of democratic governance that would be all inclusive, and that would deliver on the sort of efficiency and competence that is sorely missed, yet profoundly needed, in present day Iraq. Yet, two years later—two years of bad and feeble governance, marred by creeping authoritarian proclivities, widespread corruption, inability to deal with mounting street violence, all of which has resulted in the fracturing of the country—the people of Iraq can be forgiven for beginning to question, and even give up on, the idea of democracy. And that, if it comes to pass, is the most perilous byproduct of the weakening of Iraq’s political institutions. Built in the post-Saddam era on the foundations of representative government that serves the people and is answerable to them, Iraq’s political institutions are quickly losing legitimacy because, to Iraqis, they simply have not delivered on that democratic promise. That is the refrain heard now almost constantly from Iraqis who are interviewed on television and in the press. They complain that party leaders, parliamentarians, and officials, including Maliki and other high officials, either have no idea what democracy means, or use it to get into positions of power in order to serve their own personal interests. They look at governmental gridlock with increasing dismay and anger, and end up blaming it on the institutions themselves. At times, the frustration is such that even the days of dictatorship would be remembered as having some virtue; at least government seemed to work. It is interesting
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MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES SPRING 2012 that on the 48th anniversary of the violent death in February 1963 of General Abd al-Karim Qassem, people interviewed on the streets of Baghdad expressed almost unanimous nostalgia for this man’s rule, remembered for a number of socio-economic achievements. The fact that his five-year rule was an unabashed dictatorship, centered on a personality cult that glorified the “al-Zaim al-Awhad,” the sole leader, at the expense of political institutions, did not seem to even merit mention. This seems to be a symptom of an increasing disillusionment with democratic institutions. When a man sitting an outside café in Baghdad was asked what advice he had for the post-Qadhafi Libyan regime, he did not think twice about his answer: “they should have a president who can make all the decisions, and not have all these [parliamentary] blocs like we have now.” When reminded that at least he now could express his opinion freely, he and his friends summarily dismissed this right as utterly useless, since the government is not responsive to the public. “Nobody listens to the people,”25 was the universal lament. Still, with other parties increasingly accusing him in public of creeping authoritarianism, Maliki periodically has tried to allay the concern of the people by reiterating his faith in and commitment to the democratic process. Thus, while his government continued to support the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, he would temper that support with the occasional admonishment that the only legitimate governments are those that “are appointed by the people, not those appointed behind closed doors.”26 And in a ceremony marking the end of the American presence in Iraq, he sought to calm fears about his sectarian tendencies and perceived authoritarianism by assuring the public that he “respects political, intellectual and religious diversity in Iraq.”27 However, this statement must have provided more than a small giggle, since Sunni and Kurdish leaders had pointedly boycotted the ceremony, incensed as they were by Maliki’s treatment of Saleh Mutlaq and Tariq al-Hashimi. What this tells us is that words are cheap, to be believed only if validated by appropriate behavior, and it is on this score that the prime minister tends to come out woefully short. Nor have the other political institutions, such as parliament and the political parties, measured up to much in terms of their democratic predilections. It is true that politics is still conducted within the corridors of democratic political institutions, and while violence persists, to date it has not replaced dialogue and discussion as the
14
avenues of settling differences and disputes. Institutions still have a role, and a prime minister with palpable authoritarian impulses still feels constrained by the constitutional powers of parliament. Thus, for example, while Maliki desperately wanted to fire Saleh Mutlaq, he in fact could not because according to the constitution he needed the approval of parliament. Maliki did make the request, but it was not granted. That was indeed good news. Yet on the reverse side, Maliki took the unilateral decision of preventing Mutlaq from attending ministerial meetings. The truth is that after more than a decade of democratic transition, Iraq is still making small and uncertain steps on the path toward the goal of democratic consolidation. The fear is that as frustration, impatience, even malaise, set in and begin to reshape peoples’ attitudes toward the idea of democracy, these steps might come to a stop, or worse, even begin to reverse direction. While this eventuality is a possibility, it is not inevitable; it could be remedied if Iraq’s politicians would decide to finally put the national interest ahead of petty personal interests, if they could put together an effective government that acts as a coherent collectivity, yet is responsive to vigorous parliamentary and judicial oversight—a tall order indeed, given the performance so far of the present crop of Iraqi politicians.
Notes 1 Tim Arango, “Iraqi Youths’ Political Rise is Stunted by Elites,” New York Times, April 13, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/world/ middleeast/14iraq.html. 2
he following paragraphs condense a more detailed analysis of T the period, to be found in Adeed Dawisha, “Iraq: A Vote Against Sectarianism,” Journal of Democracy, July 2010, p. 26-40.
3
S ee Adam Przeworski, “Some problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 58-59.
4
od Nordland, “The Iraqi Voter Rewrites the Rulebook,” New R York Times, April 4, 2010, p. A1.
5
S ee the Reidar Visser’s excellent analysis in Historiae.Org, January 21, 2011, http://gulfanalysis.woedpress.com/2011/01/21/ the-first-policies-of-the-new-maliki-government. See also The Economist, March 5, 2011, p. 54.
6
l-Ahram Weekly, January 5-11, 2012, http://weekly.ahram.org. A eg/2011/1079/re7.htm.
7
Roy Gutman, et al., “Iraq’s Maliki accused of detaining hundreds of political opponents,” McClatchy Newspapers, January 19, 2012, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/19/136386/iraqs-malikiaccused-of-detaining.html.
18
ndrew E. Kramer, “Iraq Arrests More in Wake of Tip About A Coup,” New York Times, November 11, 2011, p. A10.
19
his section draws on Adeed Dawisha, “The Unraveling of Iraq: T Ethnosectarian Preferences and State Performance in Historical Perspective,” Middle East Journal, Spring 2008, p. 228-230.
8
B BC News, December 21, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldmiddle-east-16283562.
20
9
uoted in Adeed Dawisha, “The Unraveling of Iraq: EthnosectarQ ian Preferences and State Performance in Historical Perspective,” The Middle East Journal, Spring 2008, p. 222.
or a more detailed exposition, see Adeed Dawisha and Karen F Dawisha, “How to Build a Democratic Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003, p. 37-39.
21
10
See www.ens.newswire.com/ens/may2010/2020-05-14-01.html.
S awt al-Iraq, November 2, 2011, quoted in a comment in http:// gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/one-year-on-still-noiraqi-spring-in-sight.
22
aul Whitfield, “Exxon Mobil arrives in Kurdistan: A Game P Changer?” The Deal Magazine, November 28, 2011, http://www. thedeal.com/magazine/ID/043026/2011/nov-28-2011/exxonmobil-arrives-in-kurdistan-a-game-changer.php.
23
ndrew E. Kramer, “Iraq Criticizes Exxon Mobil on Kurdistan A Oil Pursuits,” New York Times, November 13, 2011, p. A12.
24
rwa Damon, “Oil Power Struggle as U.S. leaves Iraq,” CNN A News, December 12, 2011, www.cnn.com/2011/12/12/world/ meast/iraq-oil/index.html.
25
ichael S. Schmidt, “From a Few Iraqis, a Word to Libyans on M Liberation,” New York Times, August 30, 2011, p. A6.
26
ominic Evans, “Clashes kill 31 in Syria, EU hails opposition D body,” http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/10/us-syriaidUSL5E7L720620111010.
27
l-Ahram Weekly, January 5-11, 2012, http://weekly.ahram.org. A eg/2011/1079/re7.htm.
11 N ew York Times, December 31, 2011, p. A7. 12
ichael S. Schmidt and Jack Healy, “Sadr Followers Call for New M Elections a Blow to Government,” New York Times, December 27, 2011, p. A8.
13 R ieder Visser, “The Arbil Agreement versus Daawa Authoritarianism,” December 28, 2011, http://gulfanalysis.wordpress. com/2011/12/28/the-arbil-agreement-versus-daawa-authoritarianism 14
Transparency International, Corruption Perception Index 2011 (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2011).
15
ichael S. Schmidt and Omar al-Jawoshy, “Coveted Jobs in Iraq M Breed Diploma Fraud,” New York Times, October 11, 2011, p. A10.
16 A l-Ahram Weekly, January 5-11, 2012, http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2011/1079/re7.htm. 17 A l-Jazeera Satellite Television, November 12, 2011.
15
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