As we noted yesterday, the Sunday vote in Iraq now gives way to party propaganda and behind-the-scenes haggling and power plays, although a lot of the manoeuvres will be reshaped by the preliminary outcome when it is announced later this week.
Yesterday Iraq’s electoral commission reported that 62.4 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots, with rates of 50 to 80 percent across the provinces. Still too early to tell where the outcome is heading, amidst conflicting (and self-serving) claims from the parties.
On Monday, Marc Lynch offered this sharp, incisive reading, which I think holds for the post-election period as well as for the vote. This line jumped out at me — “[A] headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process”:
As early voting begins in Sunday’s national elections, Iraq has been beset by bombings: the toll from three suicide attacks in Baquba on Wednesday is now 33 dead and 42 injured, and a suicide bomber has killed three and injured 15 today at a Baghdad polling station.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it has gotten hold of an American intelligence document detailing undue Iranian influence in Iraq and in the Iraqi elections. The document says that Ahmad Chalabi and Ali al-Lami, influential members of the ‘Jusice and Accountability Committee’ in charge of purging Baathists from public life, met repeatedly with Iranian officials last fall. Among those they met were Qasim Sulaimani, head of the special forces Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade and the Iranian foreign minister. US Commanding General in Iraq, Ray Odierno, charged that Iran was behind the campaign to disqualify over 500 alleged Baathists from running in Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary, and this document seems to lend some credence to the allegation.
We’ve been trying to get our heads around the significance of Saturday’s announcement that one of Iraq’s largest Sunni political parties is going to boycott the forthcoming national elections. The New York Times plays down the story. Juan Cole also thinks that the effect on the election will not be devastating, but he considers the longer-term maneouvres and probable benefits to the leading Shi’a factions:
The Los Angeles Times reports that the National Dialogue Front, a secular party led by Salih Mutlak, is calling for a boycott of the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq. The NDF has 11 seats in parliament, but Mutlak and another prominent party member were among over 500 candidates (out of over 6000) for parliament disqualified as too close to the prohibited Baath Party. Many of those excluded from running had openly criticized the provision in the Iraqi constitution that bans members of the Baath Party from public life. The purge of Mutlak has been widely condemned in Iraq as unfair, since he left the party in the late 1970s.
Five large bombs were detonated throughout Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 127 persons and wounding 500, and damaging important government buildings. Three of the five were suicide bombs.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the bombings targeted the ministries of the interior and of finance, as well as a popular market and a court house. They hit on either side of Karkh and Rusafa districts. The first bombing struck at the gates of a Technical Institute in Dora, about 10:05 am, and then a courthouse in Karkh. The final bombing occurred in the Western Sunni district of Mansur, striking near a federal police building and a publicity office of the US military. The Ministry of Finance building hit on the edge of a market was the one employees moved into when the original Finance offices were destroyed by a massive bombing in October. Over-all, many of the dead were police or officers.
The streets were eerily empty in the aftermath of the attacks, and American helicopters hovered above the sites that had been bombed, according to al-Zaman. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that security at checkpoints was redoubled after the bombings.
Parliament’s Security Committee announced that it would question security-related cabinet ministers on December 17 as to how this serious lapse in security occurred. Hadi al-Amiri, chair of that committee, is head of the Badr Organization, a Shiite paramilitary related to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a pro-Iran, fundamentalist Shiite party. ISCI took a bath in last January’s parliamentary elections, facing a strong challenge in Baghdad and Basra from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa or Islamic Mission Party. Some of the outrage directed at the government is probably related to the upcoming parliamentary elections, in which attempts will be made to depict al-Maliki and Dawa as ineffective in providing security. Al-Zaman, reporting in Arabic, says that Baha’ al-A’raji, a Sadrist MP, also slammed the government for failing to stop the bombings….
The media are scrambling to get with grips with the double bombing in Baghdad on Sunday, targeting national and provincial ministries, that killed more than 150 people. As the BBC’s flagship radio programme somewhat blithely admitted today, the incidents “refocused” world attention on the country.
We’re going to take a couple of days before venturing a full analysis, but the one point we would make, unlikely to be highlighted in the press, is that the event exposes how peripheral the US has become to Iraq’s development. For all the troops that remain in the country, despite having the largest embassy in the world, Washington now watches as political battles are played out through violence, back-room manoeuvres, and public criticisms. This was exposed by the timing of the bomb: it came as Iraqi politicians were to discuss the difficulties stalling next January’s elections.
Mortars were fired in Baghdad, killing 7, and three bombs went off in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing 4 and wounding 48. The bombings were near to holy Shiite shrines, which is extremely dangerous. The bombing of the golden dome at Samarra in February of 2006 set off a vicious Sunni-Shiite civil war that killed thousands each month. The shrine of Imam Husayn, the Prophet’s martyred grandson, in Karbala is among the holiest sites of Shiite Islam.
2025 GMT: Mowj-e-Sabz, which has been very active today in portraying division within the Government, leaves another explosive story tonight. It claims that a member of Parliament from the “majority (conservative) faction” has “revealed that Hossein Fadaii, Tehran’s pro-Ahmadinejad MP and chairman of [the hardline pro-Ahmadinejad organisation] Isargaran was responsible for the crimes committed in Kahrizak prison [where some detainees were killed] and this has been proven for the Parliament”.
2005 GMT: Another ominous (and official) signal. The political director of the Revolutionary Guard, General Yudollah Javani, has reissued the threat to arrest opposition leaders. Having sent out the message in the Guard’s journal last week, Javani said yesterday that prosecution of Mir Hossein Mousavi would end opposition and the “blow that has been dealt to the prestige of the establishment.”
After criticising Mohammad Khatami, Javani identified his main target: “This flame of sedition cannot be put out unless through clarifying and trying the real elements [of the movement]. Mousavi should stand before the court to be enlightened.”
2000 GMT: All day there has been Twitter chatter about leaflets, circulated at Friday prayers in Tehran, calling for an attack on the main office of Etemade Melli, the party of Mehdi Karroubi, tomorrow at 4 p.m. local time.
Mowj-e-Sabz, the website of the Green movement, has picked up the story, saying that the leaflets were circulated by Ansar-e Hezbollah on the fringes of the prayer meeting. It notes websites and Facebook pages calling for Green activists to show up at the office. Read the rest of this entry »
On Sunday former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his mission both to denigrate the Obama Administration as unworthy and unsafe and to re-write history with an extended interview on CNN. After answering a damning indictment of the Bush economic record with the cure-all, “Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11,” Cheney turned to Iraq: “We’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.”
*An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney’s war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.
As we noted yesterday, the Sunday vote in Iraq now gives way to party propaganda and behind-the-scenes haggling and power plays, although a lot of the manoeuvres will be reshaped by the preliminary outcome when it is announced later this week.
The media are scrambling to get with grips with 
On Sunday former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his mission both to denigrate the Obama Administration as unworthy and unsafe and to re-write history 
Entries (RSS)