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Iraq

Chalabi’s legacy, for good and for bad, is a post-Saddam Iraq

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Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied in significant part of Ahmed Chalabi and the INC in the prelude to the 2003 Iraq invasion. (Rabih Moghrabi / AFP)
Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied in significant part of Ahmed Chalabi and the INC in the prelude to the 2003 Iraq invasion. (Rabih Moghrabi / AFP)

Ahmed Chalabi, known to most Americans as the Iraqi exile who shepherded faulty intelligence to the Bush administration that became the basis for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, died today at age 71 of a heart attack.iraq flag icon

Chalabi died in his home in Baghdad.

Though Iraq today is as clear a candidate for failed state as anywhere in the world, that obituaries will dutifully report that fact — Chalabi died at home in Baghdad — is perhaps the most salient element of Chalabi’s checkered legacy. No single Iraqi national was more responsible for bringing together the elements that would topple Saddam Hussein’s brutal Baathist regime in Iraq.

It’s true, of course, that Chalabi was a corrupt and shadowy figure, and you could have suspected that from the 1980s onward when he fled Jordan amid charges of bank fraud and embezzlement from the Petra Bank that Chalabi founded and ran throughout the decade.

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RELATED: Don’t blame Obama for Iraq’s turmoil. Blame Maliki.

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It’s also true that Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC, المؤتمر الوطني العراقي) never had any true grassroots following in Iraq during the Saddam era. When Chalabi finally returned to Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, he quickly found that Iraq’s Shiites turned to figures who hadn’t fled into exile for decades — religious authorities like Ali al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr in the 2000s and Ammar al-Hakim in the 2010s, all of whom had far more credibility with everyday Iraqis.

It’s equally true that Chalabi was one of the most vocal advocates for the ‘de-Baathification’ process that disbanded Iraq’s national military and excluded many Sunni figures (not all of whom were necessarily sympathetic to Saddam) from Iraq’s new government. That decision is now viewed as perhaps the most destabilizing thing that Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority would do in Iraq. Chalabi, who hoped to narrow the political competition in post-Saddam Iraq, helped create the sense of alienation among Iraqi’s Sunnis that would, in turn, lead to the sectarian conflict and civil war of 2006 and 2007. In an interview last year with Al Monitor, even Chalabi agreed that his vision for a democratic Iraq hadn’t materialized, though he mostly blamed the United States for that:

Iraq is now in a very difficult situation. This is not what we had hoped for when we worked to liberate the country from the regime of [former President] Saddam Hussein. However, what happened was not a surprise.

What happened could have been avoided. The fundamental problem lies in the fact that the United States was working in contrast to what we were working on, and what we had planned. The United States went in the direction of announcing an occupation, while our goal (in the Iraqi opposition), according to an agreement before the start of military operations in 2003, was to form a sovereign national Iraqi government that was recognized by a decision from countries in the [UN] Security Council. [This government would] be committed to holding free elections, so that it could subsequently ratify a constitution.

And yes, it’s true that as Washington became increasingly disenchanted with Chalabi, he turned to Iran as his patron. US policymakers pinned their hopes on other Shiite leaders, like Ayad Allawi, a London-based exile who founded the Iraqi National Accord in 1990, and eventually Nouri al-Maliki, the leader of the Islamic Dawa Party (حزب الدعوة الإسلامية‎). Allawi proved to have as little grassroots support as Chalabi, and he lasted less than a year as prime minister. Maliki proved to be a far more skilled politician than Allawi, but his initial success as a unifying nationalist in the 2009 elections gave way to an increasingly sectarian administration that excluded prominent Sunnis from the vice-presidency and key ministries and that became increasingly alienated from US officials. Disappointment with Iraq’s squabbling politicians was so bad that, after the 2013 elections, Chalabi incredulously became a candidate for prime minister in 2014 before Islamic Dawa and its allies eventually coalesced around Haider al-Abadi. To the end, Chalabi scrambled to win over allies from any community, religious or secular, Kurdish or Arab, Sunni or Shiite, in his plan to ride to Iraq’s rescue as the man with a plan to crush the jihadist ISIS/Daesh/Islamic State.  Continue reading Chalabi’s legacy, for good and for bad, is a post-Saddam Iraq →

Iraq

Don’t blame Obama for Iraq turmoil — blame Maliki

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A week ago, the biggest story in Iraq was the prospect of seemingly endless post-election coalition talks among Iraq’s secular political elite, negotiations that seemed destined to restore Nouri al-Maliki to the premiership for a third consecutive term.iraq flag icon

But the sweeping offensive last week by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL, الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام, ad-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fi al-’Irāq wa-sh-Shām‎), which burst out of Iraq’s western al-Anbar province, has now overshadowed Iraq’s April elections, bringing into serious existential question the concept of Iraqi nationhood altogether. ISIS previously took control of Fallujah and Ramadi in January, where it joined forced with Sunni tribal leaders and others angry with Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But with a force of just 700 insurgents, ISIS easily took Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, last week. It followed up by taking Tikrit, another Sunni-majority northern city and the hometown of former president Saddam Hussein. ISIS also briefly took control of oil refining center of Baiji, though government forces have now wrested control back. That leaves much of western and, now, northwestern Iraq, in the hands of ISIS and allied Sunni militias.

Sensing an opportunity, the Kurdish peshmerga quickly moved into Kirkuk, another oil-rich town historically claimed by Iraqi Kurdistan as its capital but controversially left outside of the formal borders of the Kurdish autonomous region in post-Saddam Iraq. Though it’s an embarrassment for the Maliki government to have ‘lost’ Kirkuk to the Kurds, it’s the least of his worries. Kirkuk is probably much better off under Kurdish control than under what ISIS hopes will become a jihadist caliphate that extends from northern and western Iraq through eastern Syria. It’s difficult to believe that the central Iraqi government will have enough power anytime soon to force the Kurds to relinquish Kirkuk (or its rich oil reserves).

The end result is something of an asymmetrical tripartite Iraq.  Continue reading Don’t blame Obama for Iraq turmoil — blame Maliki →

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Maliki bloc leads after Iraqi parliamentary election results announced

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Though Iraqis voted on April 30, it took the better part of May for election officials to announce the results, which appear to be good news for Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.kurdistaniraq flag icon

Heading into the elections, Maliki led a coalition of mostly Shiite parties, the State of Law Coalition (إئتلاف دولة القانون), dominated by Maliki’s own Islamic Dawa Party (حزب الدعوة الإسلامية). Maliki could rely on 89 seats in the 325-member Council of Representatives (مجلس النواب العراقي‎), Iraq’s unicameral legislature, but he governed as the head of a larger ‘national unity’ coalition after running on a broadly cross-sectarian, nationalist platform in the 2010 elections.

Iraqis, tired from the fierce Sunni-Shiite violence between 2006 and 2008, seemed weary of fighting, and the Iraqi political scene was then turning toward nationalism and away from sectarianism.

In those elections, Maliki’s State of Law coalition was actually bested by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite former prime minister who led a Sunni-dominated, cross-sectarian coalition, ‘al-Iraqiyya,‘ the Iraqi National Movement (الحركة الوطنية العراقية).

Allawi, however, wasn’t as successful as Maliki in building a governing coalition, so Maliki remained prime minister.

Here was the Chamber of Representatives on the eve of elections:

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In the past four years, Iraq has witnessed a return to sectarian violence. After US forces left the country at the end of 2011, terminating a bloody eight-year military occupation, Iraqi security forces struggled to maintain the period of relative calm in which the 2010 elections took place.

Instead, by the beginning of 2014, Maliki was regrouping after radical Sunni militias had taken control of parts of western al-Anbar province, including its largest city, Fallujah. Militias are also taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to stir mischief on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border. The rise in Sunni-Shiite tension comes as relations between the northern Kurdish autonomous government and the central Iraqi government are also fraught over the issue of oil revenues.

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RELATED: What is happening in Iraq, Fallujah and al-Anbar province?

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Meanwhile, Iraq’s ‘national unity’ government has performed horribly. With corruption running rampant, and with minister more concerned with turf than performance, the country faces daunting problems — power outages, a weak non-oil economy, massive unemployment among a rapidly growing youth population, tax collection failure, among other problems.

So in 2014, Maliki ran a campaign designed to maximize votes within his own Shiite Iraqi community — and it’s a strategy that seems to have worked:

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Maliki’s State of Law Coalition actually increased its share of the seats in the Chamber of Representatives from 89 to 92.

As Zaid al-Ali, a former legal adviser to the United Nations in Iraq writes in his excellent new book, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy, the immediate results matter less than the fact that Iraq’s politics are stunted by elites who shuffle for power at the expense of governance:

Under the current constitutional and legal system, elections will not produce any real alternatives to Iraq’s ruling elite. The fortunes of some parties may rise, while others may see their popularity wane somewhat; but the chances of anything emerging outside the current crop of incompetent and corrupt politicians are vanishingly small…. In all likelihood, Iraqis will choose to stay away from the polls in increasing numbers, leaving the politicians to play an aggrandized version of musical chairs while everyone else just watches.

Maliki wins contest among Shiite Iraqis

Maliki’s focus on winning Shiite votes effectively turned the 2014 election into a contest among competing Shiite groups, most notably the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, المجلس الأعلى الإسلامي العراقي‎), headed by  Ammar al-Hakim, and the Sadrist Movement (التيار الصدري), headed by Muqtada al-Sadr, the former militia leader who returned to Iraq after four years of self-exile in Iran (and who, ostensibly, made a fuss earlier this year over his ‘retirement’ from Iraqi politics).  Continue reading Maliki bloc leads after Iraqi parliamentary election results announced →

Iraq

Competing Shiite groups to determine Iraq’s next government

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It’s been barely over two years since all US military personnel left Iraq in December 2011, but you could be forgiven if you think that it feels much, much longer. iraq flag icon

When Iraqis go to the polls to vote today, it won’t likely make front-page headlines in the United States, even as Iraq moves away from national unity and toward growing sectarianism once again.

The last time that Iraqis went to the polls, the country seemed like it was on the mend. The destructive civil war from 2006 to 2008 that divided Baghdad (and much of the rest of Iraq) on Shiite and Sunni lines had subsided, thanks in part to a ‘surge’ of US military force and the ‘Awakening,’ a movement Sunni Iraqi leaders to combat radical elements like al-Qaeda. Iraq’s prime minister since 2006, Nouri al-Maliki, was running for reelection on a nationalist platform just as much as he was running to emerge as the leading Shiite power broker.

Fast forward four years, and Iraqis now seem less sanguine about the future than at any time since 2008. Even though Maliki (pictured above) is favored to win a third term as Iraq’s prime minister, Iraq’s future is an uncertain as ever. Exacerbated by the three-year civil war in neighboring Syria, sectarian tensions are once again on the rise. Corruption and mismanagement among Iraq’s ruling class has corroded the ability of its government to deliver even the most basic of public services, to maximize oil revenues or to provide sufficient power in Baghdad or elsewhere in the country. Members, both Sunni and Shiite, of Maliki’s ‘national unity’ government have spent the past four years fighting over access to power rather than working on policy solutions. In reality, the ‘national unity’ government, as headed by Maliki, has contributed to Iraq’s growing disunity. What’s more, it’s brought a disturbing lack of accountability — because everyone’s inside the government, there’s no opposition to hold the government accountable and there’s no credible alternative-in-waiting.

Dissatisfaction is growing at an alarming rate among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority — note that Sunni Arabs roughly constitute around 20% of Iraq’s population, with Shiite Arabs comprising around 60% and Iraqi Kurds comprising 20%.

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That’s left much of the western al-Anbar province under the control of more radical Sunni groups that are also fighting against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Clumsy attempts last December by the Maliki government to assert control over Fallujah and other cities in the Sunni-dominated west only served to empower Sunni resistance, including a fair share of radical jihadists, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL, الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام, ad-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi al-’Iraq wa-sh-Sham‎), which formerly held itself out as Iraq’s homegrown branch of al-Qaeda, and which is active in Syria as well. But the violence is no longer confined to the west — an alarming number of suicide bombings and other attacks are on the rise all across Iraq, from Baghdad to Basra, the oil-rich province in the far south.

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RELATED: What is happening in Iraq, Fallujah and al-Anbar province?

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Radical groups have warned Sunni Arabs against participating in today’s elections on threat of violence. But parts of the Sunni west are so dangerous that the central Iraqi government won’t even be able to conduct elections there. The unrest follows Maliki’s systematic exclusion of top Sunni figures from government, including Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, who fled to Iraqi Kurdistan and then Turkey after Maliki’s forces tried him for murder and sentenced him to death. From the army to the central bank to the oil ministry, Maliki has skillfully excluded his ostensible Sunni partners in favor of Shiite allies.  

Meanwhile, in the north, Iraqi Kurdistan has forged ahead with an increasingly autonomous government that’s avoided many of the missteps of the central government, even as Iraqi Kurdistan pulls further away from Baghdad. For example, the Kurdish government is now shipping 100,000 barrels of oil a day through a pipeline to Turkey, thereby exacerbating relations with Baghdad to the point that Maliki has suspended  the 17% of the Iraqi budget allocated to the Kurds. As Iraqi Kurdistan continues to prosper as an oasis of stability with a relatively successful democracy and a strong economy that is attracting a growing amount of foreign investment, it’s sharing less and less in common with the rest of Iraq that seems to be heading into turmoil.

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RELATED: Bordered by chaos, Iraqi Kurdistan holds elections in relative oasis of peace and democracy

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So amid all the gloom, what should you expect from the voting in today’s parliamentary election? Continue reading Competing Shiite groups to determine Iraq’s next government →