4 Marines Die
Fadila Withdraws from Government
Friday's guerrilla violence was relatively muted, though there were bombings and killings. The most serious incident was a firefight in Dhulu'iyyah between Shiite and Kurdish units in the Iraqi Army, which left 4 Iraqi soldiers and 7 civilians dead. Four Marines died when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal.
A senior Sunni cleric was assassinated in Basra on Friday.
Al-Zaman says that anxiety has seized the Iraqi street over the continued inability of politicians to form a government.
The Fadila Party says it has withdrawn from the new Iraqi government because it is not being offered the ministry of petroleum. The party appears to believe that US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is shaping the cabinet behind the scenes, and says it refuses to cooperate with this externally-directed process. This move is likely a piece of bargaining rather than a final disposition. The Fadila or Virtue Party is mainly popular in Basra, Iraq's port city in the south, and follows Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi, a student of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Although it stands in the line of Muqtada's father, it does not follow Muqtada al-Sadr. Fadila has 15 seats in parliament, and it is unlikely that prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki can form a strong, independent government without it. He might still be able to rule, but only in coalition with the Kurdistan Alliance, giving the Kurds a veto over all government policy.
Joost Hiltermann argues that Kurdistan leaders need to move toward a pluralistic system, not try to construct a one-party state in Kurdistan. I've been hanging out with Joost at a conference the last couple of days and as always have been impressed by his long experience and perceptiveness.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that Association of Muslim Scholars' leader Harith al-D\hari denies that he in close contact with the guerrilla movement. But, he says, he would like to see the guerrillas recognized.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/13/2006 02:09:00 AM
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"The Fadila Party says it has withdrawn from the new Iraqi government because it is not being offered the ministry of petroleum. The party appears to believe that US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is shaping the cabinet behind the scenes, and says it refuses to cooperate with this externally-directed process. This move is likely a piece of bargaining rather than a final disposition. The Fadila or Virtue Party is mainly popular in Basra, Iraq's port city in the south, and follows Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi, a student of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Although it stands in the line of Muqtada's father, it does not follow Muqtada al-Sadr. Fadila has 15 seats in parliament, and it is unlikely that prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki can form a strong, independent government without it. He might still be able to rule, but only in coalition with the Kurdistan Alliance, giving the Kurds a veto over all government policy."
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Well, OK, maybe, but is the Virtue Party going to get the portfolio it craves, then, or what? Will all the requiered "pieces of bargaining" get done before the prescribed thirty days run out? And even if so, what about the longer run?
The list of factions that Nuri/Jawad Kamal . . . al-Maliki cannot "form a strong, independent government without" is rather a long one, after all. It is ten or a hundred times easier for almost anybody inside the U.I.A. caucus -- and maybe a few outside deputies or blocs of deputies as well -- to blackmail the poor guy than it is for him to do anything strong or independent in response to them.
Prof. Cole writes as if it would be somehow a bad idea for every Tom, Dick and Harry to possess "a veto over all government policy," yet whoever perpetrated the Khalilzad Constitution was either in total disagreement with that view or else sadly incompetent. Sultan Zalmay himself has proposed to make his unlimited-gridlock system even more so, tacking on an unconstitutional or extraconstitutional "National Security Council" that would amount to Tom and Dick and Harry having to formally agree in writing before their so-called "prime minister" could so much as blow his nose. (To be sure, that foolishness came back during His Excellency's "Anybody But Jaafari!" phase, and by now he may have changed his mind a third time about exactly how much is required in the way of checks and balances and muzzles and bridles and hobbles.)
Can all this simply be an accident, a bug and not a feature? Doesn't it look a good deal as if nobody of crucial importance inside the Green Zone, or at Crawford either, really wants "a strong, independent government"? -- presumably for fear that such a dangerous Frankenstein monster or Saddam look-alike as that might one day do something they would not do themselves.
(I doubt that most of these ladies and gentlemen are deliberately and consciously aiming at a "national unity government" of utter impotence and permanent paralysis, but they almost might as well be. Unfortunately it is easy enough to understand why Tom and Dick worry about what Harry might do to them with a strong and independent government, and similarly for the other two corners that one might pick the triangle up by. The worriers may, and do, exaggerate their alarms pretty shamelessly at times, but they are none of them completely paranoid.)
Happy days.
Ayatollah Sistani, Dr. Visser, and "The open challenge to militia rule"
13 May 2006
Prof. Cole has recommended Dr. Reidar Visser and his website
[ http://historiae.org/ ]
on earlier occasions, but apparently only commenter "Christiane" noticed this most recent update [30 April 2006 at 5:11 PM]
[ http://www.juancole.com/2006/04/guerrillas-kill-25-sistani-supports.html ]
[ http://historiae.org/sistani2.asp ] [Visser]
[ http://historiae.org/images/Sistani_002.jpg ] [Sistani in hard-to-read Arabic]
and she did not mention the militia angle. JC had written
"Adil Abdul Mahdi, one of two vice presidents, went to see Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and he says that the ayatollah said that he agreed with the idea of ending the US troop presence in Iraq gradually,"
but Dr. Visser was talking about a different meeting between Mr. al-Maliki and the Grand Ayatollah, and he said nothing special about the US troop presence. Here's the most striking part of what he did say:
"On 27 April 2006, the Najaf office of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani released a pronouncement or _bayan_ which may be of greater import than any other document issued by Sistani since October 2004. The new pronouncement, published after a meeting held with prime minister designate Nuri (aka Jawad) al-Maliki, . . . . [A]
"The breaking news from Najaf can be found in the final section of the document. Here, Sistani indicates that he could once more become more involved in Iraqi politics: the religious leadership will 'watch', 'keep an eye on' or 'monitor' (the Arabic verb _raqaba_ in form III) governmental performance in the future. This is quite unprecedented in Sistani’s scholarship. Sistani has earlier signalled attachment to ideas similar to those of the Persian constitutional revolution before the First World War, when Shiite clerics fought to acquire a supervisory role which would allow them to scrutinise the Islamic legitimacy of legislation passed by parliament. This, on the other hand, may indicate a possible extension of jurisdiction, to the point where direct criticism of the executive becomes theoretically possible.
"What is the explanation for this apparent resurgence of political activity on the part of Sistani? In early 2006, he kept silent during the divisive internal Shiite struggle over who should be the United Iraqi Alliance premier candidate.[B] This seemed to suggest that he considered the matter to be outside his proper sphere of activity; indeed, had he wished to impose a candidate of his own he could easily have done so and the fractious Shiite alliance would have avoided a very public embarrassment and a delay in the political process that played directly into the hands of anti-Shiite forces and terrorists. But now, even though Sistani has increasingly sought to keep a certain distance from the United Iraqi Alliance, matters may have reached a point where he deems the deteriorating security situation to be a direct threat to the reputation of his religious leadership.
"The statement reaffirms Sistani’s view that the clergy has a role in ensuring the Islamic integrity of Iraq’s political system. At the same time, it is a strong message in defence of the integrity of Iraq as a nation, with national “unity”, not divisions on the basis of sects or ethnicity, as the leading principle. The open challenge to militia rule is in many ways a daring venture, for Sistani knows well that his religious leadership to some extent is threatened by Muqtada al-Sadr (whose followers maintain the Mahdi Army) and that militia disarmament may prove unpopular with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (which includes many members who look to Iran’s Ali Khamenei rather than to Sistani for guidance). As such, it could indicate that Sistani is now trying to reach out to the large masses of Iraqi Muslims, rather than to the leaderships of the political parties. His professional interests as a cleric dependent on large numbers of followers may have prompted this, but it may also be a gamble and an attempt to be proactive, with Sistani staking his reputation on a mix of Islamism and Iraqi nationalism. All in all, there are obvious parallels to the period 2003–2004, but also some interesting new features in Sistani’s latest message.
[A] The two paragraphs omitted at this point are about what Dr. V. himself calls "familiar ground."
[B] That was not quite my own impression. Sistani's aides, if not himself personally, made it tolerably clear that the U.I.A. should stand by its nominee.
==
I'll spare you my own amateur doubts about Visser's theory that Sistani is mostly concerned to protect his own influence or reputation. Whatever the merits of his value judgments or policy preferences, this man knows a great deal of solid fact about Iraq and I'd say he is quite correct about the potential importance of this "open challenge to militia rule," even if nobody else has paid much attention.
On another subject there is also his last word on the 15 December 2005 elections
[ http://historiae.org/SCIRI.asp ]
dated 11 February 2006, including an account of how SCIRI supposedly stole a whole lot of votes that Dr. Visser thinks morally belonged to other U.I.A. factions. Possibly everybody else in the USA will find the details about proportional representation rather more than they ever want to know, but since I live in Cambridge MA where we vote for City Council and School Committee with an equally baroque (but different) P.R. system, I loved it myself.
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