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Also see below: Who Is Fighting for Whom in Iraq? Wednesday 29 December 2004 A tiger killed a fawn and began munching on it, according to a popular Bangladeshi folk tale. A hungry bear jumped on the tiger to snatch the carcass away. The two fought until both lay mortally wounded, unable to move. A fox, which was watching the fight from a bush, scampered to the dead fawn and feasted to its heart's content. The United States overthrew Saddam Hussein only to be overwhelmed by Sunni Arab insurgency. But Sunni Arabs, being a minority, can't come to power through the Jan. 30 elections. This is why most of them are boycotting the vote. A pro-Iranian electoral alliance of the Shiite majority is predicted to win a majority of parliamentary seats and form the government. The Iranians are helping the alliance with money and volunteers, ignoring President Bush's warnings against "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq." During an appearance on an Iranian TV show recently, I was asked by an interlocutor what gave "invaders from the other end of the world the right to question our help and support" to his fellow Shiites in Iraq. Iran had been sheltering Iraqi exiles, he added, since before "(Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld and (former New York Congressman) Stephen Solarz were making pilgrimages to Baghdad (in the 1980s) with your president's goodwill messages to Saddam." The war to overthrow Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, was masterminded by a group of neoconservatives, and Patrick Buchanan and others accused them of dragging America into "Israel's war." Now Arab commentators are saying that America is fighting "Iran's war." The U.S. invasion has, besides facilitating the creation of a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, wrecked the military power of Iraq, Iran's historic adversary. Iraqi Shiites aren't a monolith, and the elections could be followed by an intra-Shiite power struggle, alongside a broader one among Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds. And the United States is deepening the Shiite-Sunni divide. President Bush got his Sunni Arab protégés, King Abdullah and interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar, to denounce Iranian "interference" in Iraqi affairs. Also, the Americans are prodding interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to try to put together a Sunni-dominated party to counter the pro-Iranian Shiite alliance. All these are alienating America from Iraqi Shiites, prompting them to align more closely with Iran. If ethnic and sectarian strife splits Iraq, the Shiite south would be the natural ally of Shiite Iran. If Iraq stays in one piece, the Iranians are likely to exert influence on its politics and policies through its Shiite majority. Iran isn't the only "fox" making hay from the fall of Saddam. The war has mobilized anti-American and anti-regime forces in the region to an unprecedented level. Muslim guerrillas from neighboring countries have joined the Iraqi insurgency. Islamist activists have ratcheted up their campaign against Jordanian and Saudi Arabian monarchies, citing these regimes' tacit support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. An Arab American friend who has returned from a tour of the region tells me that in Jordan's cafes and on college campuses King Abdullah II is being openly denounced as America's "lackey" and "collaborator." My friend had not seen Jordanians criticize the monarchy so harshly and publicly before. Unprecedented, too, was the recent attempt to stage anti-government demonstrations in Saudi Arabia. The London-based Movement for Islamic Reforms, which U.S. intelligence sources suspect is linked to Osama bin Laden, called for the protest. Hundreds of activists were preparing to pour into the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah when police dispersed them. Meanwhile, the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah came under a brazen attack from "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," and bin Laden was quick to release an audio tape commending the guerrillas. More ominous is his call to supporters to target America's oil supplies, which prompted a series of attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure. Bin Laden may have set his eyes on the most vital U.S. interest in the region, which seemed to be safe before the Iraq war. Maybe America is fighting bin Laden's war, too.
Malik, a Washington journalist, researched U.S.-Arab relations in Iraq and other Arab countries in the 1990s as a research associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center. Earlier, he carried out diplomatic assignments for the Pakistan government in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. Top Sunni Party Quits Election Tuesday 28 December 2004 Citing violence across Iraq, the group pulls out of the Jan. 30 vote. The move threatens to deepen the Muslim sect's political alienation. Baghdad - Iraq's most prominent Sunni Muslim religious party announced Monday that it was withdrawing from next month's parliamentary elections, saying that violence remains too grave to conduct the vote. The move by the Iraqi Islamic Party threatens to deepen the political alienation of the nation's Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20% of the population but were long favored under Saddam Hussein's government. Many Sunnis have supported the insurgency and fear that the upcoming ballot will only cement their loss of influence as majority Shiite Muslims vote for members of their own sect. Yet Sunni support for and participation in a new government are considered crucial to stabilizing Iraq. The Sunni party said Monday that it remained committed to the electoral process but that violence across the Sunni heartland north and west of Baghdad "that every day moves from bad to worse" made it necessary to delay the Jan. 30 vote for as long as six months. "We need extra time," party head Mohsen Abdel Hamid said. "This is not a boycott.... When the proper circumstances exist to enter into comprehensive elections, we'll enter." The party's pullout leaves several Sunni-dominated parties in the campaign, including the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, elder statesman Adnan Pachachi's Independent Democratic Movement and interim President Ghazi Ajil Yawer's party. Last month, the Iraqi Islamic Party was among several Sunni parties that called for a delay in the voting. But Shiite politicians and U.S. officials have pushed to hold the balloting as scheduled. The Bush administration has launched a major diplomatic and political campaign to encourage Sunnis to vote and has even voiced support for a quota system to guarantee Sunni politicians seats in the new national assembly. Ongoing violence in Al Anbar and Nineveh provinces, both Sunni Arab power centers, has greatly hindered electoral preparations. In Al Anbar, home to the rebellious cities of Fallouja and Ramadi, voter registration efforts are at a virtual standstill. In Mosul, capital of Nineveh in the north, clashes and attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces occur daily. Campaigning has been difficult, if not impossible. An official with an international organization working on political party development, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Sunni Arab politicians "do have a legitimate beef" on the safety of Sunni-dominated areas. Jaber Habib, a Baghdad University political science professor, said the threat of insurgent attacks in Al Anbar and Nineveh would distort the entire campaign process. "Even their candidates can't reveal their names or they might be killed," he said. "How can they campaign like that?" The violence cited by the Iraqi Islamic Party was underscored Monday morning by a car bomb attack on the Baghdad home of Abdelaziz Hakim, a likely candidate for prime minister and a top name on the unified Shiite electoral slate, or the United Iraqi Alliance, that's expected to win a major share of the vote. Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, was home at the time, but wasn't injured in the attack, which killed at least nine and wounded more than 50, according to police. The blast left a 10-foot crater and destroyed several passing cars, but did minimal damage to the SCIRI building. Hakim's son Ammar gave an impromptu news conference at the blast site, blaming the attack on elements wishing to sow fitna - an Arabic term for sectarian, ethnic or political conflict. But the attack, he said, only sharpened the party's commitment to hold elections on schedule. "We will not let an incident such as this one derail us from pursuing the elections," Ammar Hakim said. "These elections in turn will pave the way to security and stability." Voters are scheduled to elect a 275-member transitional national assembly that will be charged with selecting a government, including a prime minister, and overseeing the drafting of a constitution. Other elections will be held to ratify the constitution and elect a new government in 2006. But an electoral result that further minimizes the already shrunken political power of Sunni Arabs could serve to deepen the insurgency and extend Iraq's violent spiral. In addition to the Iraqi Islamic Party's pullout, the Muslim Scholars Assn., an influential hard-line Sunni group, has called for a boycott, rejecting as illegitimate any election under what it calls foreign occupation. The party's decision to withdraw from the Jan. 30 vote was announced before news of a recording purportedly from Osama bin Laden was aired. The message urged Sunnis to boycott the election and called anyone who participated an "infidel." It was unclear how that message might affect Sunnis' decision to take part in the balloting. The Iraqi Islamic Party must still formally notify the United Nations-appointed Iraqi electoral commission. Until then, it remains a legitimate participant and potential vote-getter. The White House responded to the withdrawal announcement by repeating its calls for full participation. "We'd like to see as broad a participation as possible. We've made that quite clear," spokesman Trent Duffy said. Efforts to coax Sunni politicians and voters into the electoral process have taken on increasing urgency as the vote nears. But ideas such as guaranteeing Sunnis seats in the transitional national assembly regardless of their vote totals have been met with some resistance. Habib, the political analyst, said a quota system would only weaken the already marginal perceived legitimacy of the process. "I don't see how to make that work with democracy," he said. But the democratic development organization official who requested anonymity said that many of the Sunni politicians' moves - including the Islamic party's withdrawal and Pachachi's November call for a postponement - could be seen as maneuvers made with an eye toward a postelection negotiation process for greater representation. Many of the politicians, she said, want to get their objections on the record now but will probably take part in the vote and then argue for some sort of post election adjustment. "They participate anyway. Whatever their percentage of the vote, they say, 'We would have gotten more, and you should give us some seats,' " the official said. "There's nothing to say that the size of the national assembly couldn't go up. You could find a compromise." The Perfect Candidate for Iraq Wednesday 29 December 2004 Some time around high noon EST, three weeks from today, George W. Bush will be sworn in for a second term as president, or as some of us think of it, "Dubya Dubya Too." Ten days after that, Iraqis will strap on their body armor and go to the polls to vote for leaders of their own. More than 100 slates of candidates are in the running, but I know whom Iraq voters' choice should be. Who better to govern Iraq than the man who broke it, bought it and now pledges to put it back together again: George W. Bush? Like the Lone Ranger, Bush can make the claim to Americans that his work here is done. He has made his point: The Bush family second-term curse has been broken. It's all lame-duck downhill from here. So why not share his gospel of freedom in person and double-down democracy? There are so many reasons, political and personal, that Bush should be the president of post-Hussein Iraq. Iraq could suit Bush a lot better than the Beltway culture of white-shoe lawyers and lobbyists and think-tank intellectuals. The man who is pleased to "see freedom on the march" has earned the right to see it marching up close, from the reviewing stands of the Baghdad parade ground. The reasons for Bush to become president of Iraq:
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