BEIRUT — I’d like to pick a wee bone with Tom Fried­man. Well, actu­ally not him specif­i­cally, but really the Amer­i­can ten­dency to empha­size the actions of indi­vid­u­als over larger, coun­ter­vail­ing forces in pol­i­tics. Exhibit A: Friedman’s opin­ion that the action of a brave Iraqi in Par­lia­ment is a good rea­son to keep at it in Iraq (Times’ Select, sorry):

I am often asked why I don’t just give up on Iraq and pro­nounce it a lost cause. It would cer­tainly make my job (and mar­riage) eas­ier.
What holds me back are scenes like the one related in last Sunday’s Times story from Bagh­dad about the Iraqi Parliament’s vote to approve the country’s new cab­i­net. Our story noted that dur­ing the Iraqi par­lia­men­tary ses­sion, the Sunni party leader Saleh Mut­laq, a for­mer Baathist, stood up and started denounc­ing the deci­sion by Prime Min­is­ter Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to have Par­lia­ment vote on the new cab­i­net even though he hadn’t yet filled the key secu­rity posts.
At that point, another Sunni politi­cian, Mithal al-Alousi, told Mr. Mut­laq to sit down. “Iraqi blood is being spilled every day,” Mr. Alousi said. It was time to move for­ward. When Mr. Mut­laq pressed on with his denun­ci­a­tions, Mr. Alousi “pulled him down into his chair,” The Times reported. That was a gutsy move — live on Iraqi TV. Many Sunni insur­gents may not like what Mr. Alousi did, but he did it any­way.
As long as I see Iraqis ready to take a stand like that, I think we have to stand with them. When we don’t see Iraqis tak­ing the risk to build a pro­gres­sive Iraq, then it is indeed time to pack and go. That moment may come soon. It’s hard to tell. I won’t hes­i­tate to say so — but not yet.

If only it were _Iraqis_ instead of _an Iraqi_ tak­ing a stand. As the say­ing goes, one swal­low does not a sum­mer make.
I know Mithal al-Alousi and Saleh Mut­laq. I’ve spo­ken with them both on numer­ous occa­sions. I like them both, in their own way, and con­sider them friends of a sort. But al-Alousi is dif­fer­ent. He’s the most — and pos­si­bly only — truly hon­or­able Iraqi politi­cian I’ve met. This is a guy, a Sunni, who stands firmly for sec­u­lar­ism, who doesn’t believe that the Israeli-Palestinian fight is one that Iraq should be in, and who paid for a trip to Israel in order to fos­ter ties with the strongest econ­omy in the region with the lives of his two sons. He also believes in equal­ity before the law, and — no for­mer Ba’athist he — has been harshly crit­i­cal of the De-Ba’athification Com­mis­sion because it was run by polit­i­cal hacks work­ing for their respec­tive par­ties, so they were able to grind many, many axes against men and women who did noth­ing wrong but try to feed their fam­i­lies in an unjust sys­tem.
Obvi­ously, he’s not a per­fect man. He was jailed for a year in Ger­many for attempt­ing to take over the Iraqi embassy prior to the March 2003 inva­sion. But even that grew out of his frus­tra­tion with Saddam’s regime.
(Edit: And his trip to Israel _was_ ill-advised in the polit­i­cal cli­mate of Iraq. But he was fol­low­ing the lead of his old buddy Ahmad Cha­l­abi and the Iraqi National Con­gress, who said to the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions that “Iraq should rec­og­nize Israel”:http://www.cfr.org/publication/6044/conversation_with_ahmad_chalabi.html. (Way down at the bot­tom.) When al-Alousi took actual steps to fol­low that up, the INC hung him out to dry and called for his head. With friends like that…)
Mut­laq, on the other hand, is a for­mer Ba’athist and claims to have some pull with the insur­gency. What the two men have in com­mon, other than being co-religionists, is that nei­ther has any real con­stituency to speak of.
Al-Alousi, bless him, got a sin­gle seat in Par­lia­ment. Mut­laq has about 11, I believe, but his claim to influ­ence rests in his alleged influ­ence with the Ba’athist ele­ments of the insur­gency. Sorry to say, every Ba’athist ever inter­viewed by TIME viewed Mut­laq as a pre­tender and paid no atten­tion to him.
So those who have hoped more than planned for this war are bet­ting on what is prob­a­bly a los­ing horse, despite al-Alousi’s hon­esty and earnest­ness. if only there were more guys like him in power! But there aren’t, because reli­gion and tribal loy­al­ties get the bet­ter of Iraqis when they need to stand up for guys like al-Alousi. I know many Iraqis who like and admire al-Alousi, but when it came time to vote in Decem­ber, they went with the Sis­tani list (if they were Shi’a) or Adnan al-Dulaimi’s list (if they were Sunni), even though they said before­hand how much they dis­liked cler­ics run­ning the show. Al-Alousi’s vision of sec­u­lar­ism and lib­er­al­ism just can’t com­pete with the forces rend­ing Iraq these days. And hop­ing peo­ple like Mut­laq and Dulaimi will be able to curb the insur­gency — or even want to, since that’s all that gives the Sun­nis a seat at the table — is a real gam­ble. Based on what I know, I don’t think the newly-elected Sunni par­lia­men­tar­i­ans will be able to deliver jack.
Friedman’s desire to look at al-Alousi as a sign that all is not lost in Iraq is nat­ural. Amer­i­cans are pre­dis­posed towards cel­e­brat­ing the actions and inten­tions of indi­vid­u­als in pol­i­tics. We vote for can­di­dates rather than lists, which points up the incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties of Amer­i­can expec­ta­tions and hopes, and the forces of group-think, sec­tar­i­an­ism and trib­al­ism at work in Iraq. Unless you’re Sad­dam, one per­son is just not going to make a huge dif­fer­ence in Iraq. Case in point: When the Amer­i­cans ran the show, the appointed a sec­u­lar Shi’ite, Ayad Allawi, as prime min­is­ter, who turned around and waged war on Fal­lu­jah and Moq­tada al-Sadr. Now, after two elec­tions and one ref­er­en­dum, the Iraqi peo­ple have elected a gov­ern­ment that has become more sec­tar­ian, not less; more divided and divi­sive. Today, al-Sadr’s a king­maker within the gov­ern­ment and the insur­gency is as vir­u­lent as ever. That’s democ­racy in Iraq. Moder­nity lost.
Look, I’ll be hon­est: I don’t know what the Amer­i­can course of action should be exactly. Stay? Leave? It’s a bit of a trick ques­tion because the mil­i­tary com­po­nent of the Amer­i­can pres­ence has been, well, almost the entirety of the Amer­i­can pres­ence, and this has long not been a mil­i­tary prob­lem. Of course U.S. troops should go as soon as pos­si­ble. But what’s really needed is an army of police train­ers, tech­ni­cians and peo­ple who can get the econ­omy back on its feet and power flow­ing again, from Amer­ica and from around the region. You want to see the forces of sec­u­lar­ism advance in Iraq? Put al-Alousi in charge of the elec­tric­ity min­istry and then spare no expense to get the lights back on for more than four hours a day in Bagh­dad — and then let him take the credit. Put sec­u­lar­ists in charge of the anti-corruption watch­dog Com­mit­tee for Pub­lic Integrity and give it some real bite. Rid plum posts like the Finance Min­istry of dis­cred­ited retreads like Bayan Jabr and put real econ­o­mists in place so they can boost employ­ment in the south. That would be a good start.
If the Iraqis are unwill­ing to take steps that de-emphasize local, tribal and sec­tar­ian loy­al­ties in their pol­i­tics — and fast — well, maybe the U.S. should just pack up and leave. These days, al-Alousi is a lonely swal­low indeed.

BAGHDAD — Things are, pretty obvi­ously, mov­ing slowly in the for­ma­tion of the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment. I ran into Mah­moud Oth­man, a ras­cally Kurd who has been a fix­ture of Iraqi pol­i­tics since the old CPA days, out­side the Iraqi Con­ven­tion Cen­ter today after renew­ing my press cre­den­tials. We stopped a moment to talk. Because his son is the spokesman for Pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani, I con­sider him fairly plugged in.
“Time is not on our side,” he said, com­plain­ing of the slow pace of gov­ern­ment nego­ti­a­tions. The results of the elec­tions have been known, more or less, for a long time but the var­i­ous party lead­ers are wait­ing for the offi­cial results to be released later this week before they enter into gov­ern­ment nego­ti­a­tions in earnest. And one of the major stum­bling blocks, of course, is who is going to be prime min­is­ter. Since the 555 list (United Iraqi Alliance) con­tains mul­ti­ple par­ties — Sadrists, Dawa Party, SCIRI and oth­ers — there is con­cern that the head of the UIA and the PM should not come from the same party. This could sink Vice Pres­i­dent Adel Abdul Mehdi’s chances to take the pre­mier­ship because he and the 555 head, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, are both from SCIRI. Jaa­fari may yet stick around because of that.
Oth­man — and a major­ity of Iraqis, for that mat­ter — think Jaa­fari has been a weak and inef­fec­tual PM, but he would be accept­able to the other mem­bers of the coali­tion. Why? Min­istries in Iraq are handed out to var­i­ous par­ties who then hand out jobs and favors to fam­ily mem­bers, and tribal and polit­i­cal allies. A strong and pop­u­lar chief exec­u­tive would be an imped­i­ment to this crony­ism.
But the Amer­i­cans are push­ing for Mehdi because of his appar­ent pro-Western sen­ti­ment. He’s also con­sid­ered mal­leable. But in this case, he’d be manip­u­lated by the Amer­i­cans instead of, as in the case of Jaa­fari, other coun­tries that are spelled almost like “Iraq” but with an “n” instead of “q”. Accord­ing to _al-Mutamar_, a news­pa­per pub­lished by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Con­gress, U.S. Ambas­sador Zal­may Khalilzad has wrung a com­mit­ment from Mehdi to reduce Iran­ian influ­ence in Iraq in return for sup­port­ing him for prime min­is­ter.
To that effect, Khalilzad is threat­en­ing to orga­nize an oppo­si­tion bloc in Par­lia­ment if Mehdi isn’t the can­di­date. The paper reports that this bloc’s can­di­date would be Barham Salih, from the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan. (Pre­sum­ably because get­ting Mehdi to leave SCIRI would be dif­fi­cult.) Salih is the cur­rent min­is­ter of plan­ning and a thor­oughly capa­ble, Western-educated guy. He’s a pro-American tech­no­crat through and through.
Despite the wran­gling over the pre­mier­ship, Oth­man said SCIRI would prob­a­bly keep the Inte­rior Min­istry, although Bayan Jabr would be out of job. The Sun­nis would keep the Defense Min­istry, but again, with some per­son­nel changes. Maybe they’ll get some­one who is up to the job instead of the feck­less, but well-meaning, Sadoun al-Dulaimi. “I think we will keep the for­eign min­istry,” Oth­man chuck­led, refer­ring to the uni­ver­sally regarded Hoshi al-Zebari. (I think he’s uni­ver­sally regarded because he’s never in the coun­try. Absence does make the Iraqi heart grow fonder, it would seem.) It’s almost cer­tain that Jalal Tal­a­bani will remain pres­i­dent.
So when we we see a new gov­ern­ment? Oth­man just smiled and walked away.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Bagh­dad, Iraq, Mid­dle East, News and Politics

… but not enough. “No” votes were 55% and “yes” votes were 45%. This doesn’t sound too out of line to me. This means Iraq has a new con­sti­tu­tion.
For the con­sti­tu­tion to have failed, it needed to be voted down by at least 66% in any three provinces. Anbar and Sula­hadin both reached this point, but Nin­eveh and Diyalah did not.
The real ques­tion now will be whether the Sun­nis will accept this vote as fair. Saleh Mut­laq of the National Dia­logue Coun­cil and oth­ers have said they defeated the ref­er­en­dum in all four Sunni-majority provinces: Anbar, Diyala, Sulah­hadin and Ninevah. But the num­bers released by the IECI today don’t show that, obvi­ously. Dialya and Ninevah have sig­nif­i­cant non-Sunni pop­u­la­tions: Shi’ites in Diyala and Kurds, Chris­tians and Turko­mans in Nin­eveh. Anbar and Sulah­hadin both rejected the char­ter by wide mar­gins.
“As I wrote”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/10/quiet_election_1.php, this is the worst-case scenario:

The absolute worst-case sce­nario is if the Sun­nis come close to defeat­ing the con­sti­tu­tion, but fail. There will be accu­sa­tions of vote-rigging and any polit­i­cal momen­tum the Sun­nis felt was mov­ing their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have con­sol­i­dated their power and those Sun­nis on the fence might be moved into active oppo­si­tion. The insur­gency might even worsen, if such things are pos­si­ble, or a close vote might be the trig­ger for open civil war.

Still, it’s not impos­si­ble that Sun­nis might see the light of rea­son in this and decide to come out and vote on Dec. 15 for a per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment. A last-minute deal between the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Shi’ite and Kur­dish groups agreed that the per­ma­nent con­sti­tu­tion would be more tem­po­rary than the name implies. The lead­ers agreed that after the elec­tion in Decem­ber — which will see an increase in the num­ber of Sun­nis in par­lia­ment — the con­sti­tu­tion will be thrown open to amend­ments. Shi’ite politi­cians such as Jawad al-Maliki of the Dawa Party said it would be open to only some fine-tuning. The Iraqi Islamic Party said, how­ever, that the whole thing was open for dis­cus­sion. The truth is all groups were play­ing to their base in the hopes of turn­ing out the vote, so the actual state of nego­ti­a­tions lies some­where in between the two extremes. Luck­ily, there are still nego­ti­a­tions, which is bet­ter than noth­ing, I sup­pose.
And already, some Sunni politi­cians are sound­ing con­cil­ia­tory notes. Mishaan al-Jubouri, a Sunni leg­is­la­tor from the Lib­er­a­tion and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Party, said, “We will par­tic­i­pate in the next elec­tions. We will try to make a demo­c­ra­tic, sec­u­lar major­ity in the par­lia­ment and try to change the con­sti­tu­tion.“
He groused that the rea­son Nin­eveh didn’t pass was that sev­eral Kur­dish cities — Makhmor, Okhra and Shikhan — were included in the province that, his­tor­i­cally, should not have been included. These cities are all Fallujah-sized or smaller, mean­ing around 250,000 peo­ple or so. (“Prob­a­bly half a mil­lion each now,” A., my office man­ager, grum­bled, voic­ing the sus­pi­cion that Kurds had swamped the city with new vot­ers just before the ref­er­en­dum.)
But, al-Jubouri added, “I don’t think that there was manip­u­la­tion of the votes _after the clos­ing of the bal­lot boxes_.” Despite my empha­sis, this is a good sign, I think. He also said he is already look­ing ahead to Dec. 15, when Iraqis go to the polls, _again_, and elect a per­ma­nent par­lia­ment. “We will run in Baby­lon, Bagh­dad, Diyalah, Anbar, Sula­hadin, Ninevah and Kirkuk,” he said, and added he would like to form a par­lia­men­tary coali­tion with for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Iyad Allawi’s bloc. “I think he will win a major­ity of seats in the next par­lia­ment.“
But this brings up the point of what the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Iraq will look like down the road. Assum­ing this smol­der­ing civil war doesn’t ignite fur­ther, _this is the polit­i­cal situation:_ A con­stantly shift­ing set of alliances with Sun­nis gen­er­ally com­ing out with the short end of the stick. Strat­for (sub­scrip­tion only, sorry) notes that this means that pol­i­tics and the trap­pings of state will fade into the back­ground. “The rest of soci­ety — clans, fam­i­lies, cor­po­ra­tions, orga­nized crime — are empha­sized,” the think tank reports. “An Iraq with eter­nally shift­ing pol­i­tics is not incom­pat­i­ble with the notion of a func­tion­ing soci­ety.“
Maybe. But a nation with those insti­tu­tions empow­ered instead of the state sure sounds dif­fer­ent from what the United States has pub­licly stated is the desired end result: a demo­c­ra­tic, united, fed­eral and plu­ral­is­tic state. In fact, with the excep­tion of cor­po­ra­tions, it sounds a lot like Iraq today.
PS: Here’s a table of the final per­cent­ages. “Click here”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/upload/2005/10/results_25.pdf for a PDF of all the results.