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Upsurge of Sunni Violence Follows Election Results    [

    Civil War-Elect
    By Robert Dreyfuss
    TomPaine.com

    Monday 23 January 2006

    There's no one left to put Humpty Dumpty together again in Baghdad. Zalmay Khalilzad, America's feckless ambassador in Iraq, is trying. But, unwilling or unable to reach out to the Iraqi resistance, Khalilzad instead finds himself immersed instead in gooey egg mass. The Iraqi body politic is shattered, with little hope now of avoiding an all-out civil war. That's the only conclusion that can be reached by looking at the results of the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq, whose official returns were announced on Friday.

    Those results gave the Shiite religious bloc 128 seats out of 275. Their junior partners, the two Kurdish warlord parties, got 53. The religious Sunnis got 44, the secular Sunni parties got 11, and Iyad Allawi's non-ethnic, secular alliance got 25. So the coalition of Shiite fundamentalists and Kurdish warlords controls 173 seats, at least, just a few votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. Let's look at the bad news, item by item.

    First, the Arab League's peace initiative for Iraq is dead. It was, I've written, perhaps the last best hope for holding Iraq together and avoiding an ethnic-sectarian war. The effort began last fall, when Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan organized an initiative to hold talks between Iraq's Shiite-Kurdish government, the Sunni-led opposition, and the resistance. Scheduled for Cairo last November, the first meeting failed when the two fundamentalist Shiite parties, Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said that they would not talk to the insurgents, whom they describe as "terrorists." (That word, in fact, is increasingly used by SCIRI and Al Dawa to refer to all Sunnis in Iraq, not just to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda or even to the Baathist-military resistance.) In December, I wrote for TomPaine.com that the Arab League effort would collapse if the SCIRI-Dawa forces, augmented by the fanatical Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr, won big in the elections. They did, winning nearly half of the seats in the new parliament. So, no surprise: on Saturday, Iraq's foreign minister, a Kurd, announced that the scheduled Arab League follow up meeting in February, which had been dubbed a National Accord Conference, would not be held.

    Second, the notion that Iraq can form a "national unity government" now, led by the SCIRI-Dawa-Mahdi Army coalition, is beyond absurd. Khalilzad, described by The New York Times, as the "unabashedly hands-on U.S. ambassador," is pushing hard for the inclusion of some docile Sunnis in the new government. "The advice of Zal, as he is known here, will not be subtle," says the Times , hopefully. And listen to the pathetically na ve musings of a "senior U.S. official" in Iraq, quoted by Reuters:

    For us Iraq can't build on a relatively narrower sectarian or ethnic basis. It has to be inclusive. We support a unity government as the best means of bringing Iraqis together after a hard-fought election contest, and we are encouraging all sides in this to look to the advantages. In the end it's an Iraqi decision not an American decision. We are prepared to help the Iraqis in any way we can to reach an agreement that brings the country together, broadens the base of support of the Iraqi government and results in a competent and capable government.

    In fact, however, the all-or-nothing sectarianism of Iraq is now set in stone. That is thanks to nearly three years of U.S. mismanagement in Iraq, during which time the United States first insisted on installing in power the creatures that populated Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its exile allies, then forced every Iraqi institution from the 2003 Iraqi Governing Council to the interim government of Iyad Allawi on down to apportion its power according to some ethnic and sectarian census, meanwhile encouraging the SCIRI-Dawa alliance to establish its power, and its paramilitary forces, throughout southern Iraq.

    Why is a national unity government impossible? Because the 55 Sunnis who were elected to the parliament do not represent the resistance, and so they cannot exercise influence over the fighters opposed to the U.S. occupation. And, even among those Sunnis who will now take up seats in the parliament, only a handful-perhaps the Iraqi Islamic Party and a few others - are willing to join the Shiite-dominated regime. Therefore, Khalilzad cannot succeed in creating a broad-based Iraqi government that can successfully appeal to the resistance. All the king's horses and all the king's U.S. troops can't do it.

    Making everything worse is the fact that the hard-line Shiites, especially Abdel Aziz Al Hakim and Adel Abdel Mahdi of SCIRI, have ruled out even minor compromises with the Sunni opposition. Their policy is: No to "the terrorists," no to changes in the divisive Iraqi constitution, and no to the Arab League. By refusing to change the constitution, the Shiites insist on the imposition of sharia-style Islamic courts, insist on grabbing nearly all of Iraq's future oil revenues for the Shiite south, insist on creating breakaway "federal" states in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south, insist on giving Kirkuk to the revanchist and expansionist Kurds, and more.

    That's the ersatz constitution, you will recall, that passed in a referendum on Oct. 15, despite the fact that 50 of its 130 clauses hadn't yet been finished, despite the fact that copies of the document weren't printed and circulated to the population that was voting, despite the fact that it was written in secret (under U.S. supervision) by the Shiite-Kurd majority over the objections of the token Sunnis in the room. The Sunni community was tricked into voting on Oct. 15 and then Dec. 15 by promises that the constitution's bad provisions could be amended. Now, SCIRI says: No such luck.

    Making things even worse, the Shiites continue to insist that Sunnis who were elected to the parliament are too close to the resistance and are therefore "terrorists." This is not an argument calculated to win friends among the Sunni bloc. If SCIRI demands that Sunni politicians disavow the armed resistance, they will succeed only in recruiting a handful of quislings into the quisling-run regime in Baghdad. It's part and parcel of the dead-end "de-Baathification" scheme that was pushed so far by Chalabi. It's now been twisted to the most extreme interpretation. "The Shiites have turned de-Baathification into de-Sunnification," according to Salman Al Jumayli, spokesperson for the Sunni Accordance Front, which has 44 seats in the coming parliament. "They're only targeting Sunnis and they've turned it into a weapon to get rid of all their political opponents." Khalilzad seems genuinely distressed by this, but he is at a loss over what to do about it. What seems clear is that the signals put out by Khalilzad before the election, about being willing to talk to the resistance, have been extinguished, along with Allawi's hopes of getting enough seats to create a nonsectarian, centrist (and pro-U.S.) government.

    So what's left is an increasingly Iran-leading, Shiite fundamentalist theocracy with a rump Kurdish republic attached to it. And you can put this in your signs-of-things-to-come file: Muqtada Sadr, the cherubic (and Rubenesque) militant young cleric, said on Sunday that the Mahdi Army, which is now a big part of the Iraqi government to be, says that his forces will fight alongside Iran's if Iran is attacked by the United States over its nuclear program.

    So it's curtains for Bush's "victory or defeat" policy. The insurgency will strengthen, so that won't help. The Shiites are likely to move in an increasingly radical (and pro-Iranian direction), so that won't help. The violence will get worse.

    --------

    Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

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    Upsurge of Sunni Violence Follows Election Results
    By Marcus Tanner
    The Independent UK

    Sunday 22 January 2006

    A bomb struck the motorcade of President Jalal Talabani and at least 11 others were killed in a widely predicted upsurge of Sunni violence following the release of last month's controversial Iraqi election results.

    The road side bomb wounded five members of the President's staff late on Friday night, 75 miles south of the oil city of Kirkuk, as they drove back to the capital from the Kurdish region in the north. President Talabani was not present.

    Elsewhere, 11 Iraqis, including an army major, three policemen and three butchers, were killed in a separate bomb blasts and in a drive-by shooting. Yesterday's bloodshed almost equalled Thursday's high death toll, when 15 Iraqis were killed in bombings in Baghdad.

    Both the Iraqi government and the Americans have been bracing for a bout of Sunni militancy after the final results of the parliamentary elections confirmed the victory of parties representing the far more numerous Shia, leaving Iraq's formerly dominant Sunni minority with the prospect of being excluded from power.

    The results awarded the Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance 128 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi assembly, only 10 short of an absolute majority, while their probable future coalition partners among the various Kurdish parties won 53 seats. Sunni parties took only around 50 seats, leaving their participation in government open to question. Foreign governments, led by the US, have urged Iraqis to form a broad-based government including all three of Iraq's main communities, in the hope of undercutting the grounds for Sunni anger over the election results. Many of them claim the results are fraudulent.

    After the results are ratified in about two weeks, President Talabani has 15 days to convene parliament, which must choose a new president. He will then designate a prime minister from the Shia bloc who must present a cabinet to parliament for approval within a month.

    Within minutes of the release of the results of the election, Sunni rebels had launched mortar attacks on two US bases in Ramadi, causing minor injuries to US solders, and leading the government on Thursday to seal off the three predominantly Sunni Arab provinces for 48 hours.

    With no let-up in sight to Iraq's carnage, or to the wave of kidnappings, a delegation of American Muslims arrived in Baghdad to plead for the release of an American journalist, Jill Carroll, who was taken hostage in Baghdad's suburbs on 7 January.

    The kidnappers of the freelance reporter, from The Christian Science Monitor, have threatened to kill her unless American forces release all Iraqi women currently held in military custody. The deadline expired on Friday. "We are very hopeful they will hear our message on behalf of American Muslims," said Nadi Awad, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, referring to the kidnappers, who have been identified as a previously unknown group called "The Revenge Brigade". "Harming her will do them no good at all. The only way is to release her," Mr Awad added.

    Ibrahim Ali, Iraq's deputy Justice Minister, urged the US to release six Iraqi women now in US detention on Monday or Tuesday in order to help Ms Carroll. American officials have confirmed that they are holding nine Iraqi women detainees.

    More than 240 foreigners have been taken captive in Iraq and at least 39 killed since the 2003 invasion by US-led forces.

    There has been no word about the fate of Norman Kember, the 74-year-old British peace activist seized on November 26 with two Canadians and an American. The four were seized by a group calling itself the Swords of Truth, which demanded the release of all Iraqi prisoners by 10 December, a deadline that was not met.