Maliki said Near to Forming Government
Turks shell Kurdish village
It is being alleged that Prime Minister designate Nuri al-Maliki will present his cabinet to parliament on Saturday. If he fails, according to the constitution, the president will have to ask someone else to form the government. (Though Iraqi politicians are dismissing any need to comply with that clause. Once you are in the Old Boys Club, who needs a mere constitution?)
Al-Zaman/ AFP report that the (Shiite fundamentalist) United Iraqi Alliance has increased its share of cabinet portfolios from 15 to 17, five of them powerful posts. The Kurdistan Alliance has 5 cabinet posts, including one powerful ministry (Foreign Affairs). The (fundamentalist Sunni Arab) Iraqi Accord Front has 4 cabinet posts and no powerful ones. The Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi received 4 cabinet posts, and the (ex-Baathist Sunni) National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak received 3, though Mutlak has rejected them because they are relatively insignificant positions, politically.
Prime Minister designate Nuri al-Maliki is still negotiating with Allawi's list in an effort to satisfy them. [Al-Maliki is actually being quite generous to them. They have 25 seats in parliament, whereas the Iraqi Accord Front has 44, yet they are each being offered 4 cabinet posts. Mutlak's National Dialogue Front only has 11 seats, so doesn't at all deserve 3 ministries, even unimportant ones.]
Maliki is obviously more interested in making the Iraqi National List happy than in making the Sunni fundamentalists happy, and I speculate that this is because he can imagine some of the Iraqi National List voting with his UIA on some key issues (some UIA members are ethnic Shiites, though they are secularists).
Al-Zaman's sources say that a majority of the parties that make up the United Iraqi Alliance rejected corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi as candidate for minister of the interior on the grounds that he is not actually an independent and also maintains his own militia. Interior had been penetrated by the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq under Bayan Jabr, and the Iraqi political elite and the Americans are agreed that the next minister of the interior should not have militia ties.
The UIA Shiites will get the ministries of finance, petroleum, interior, electricity, labor, municipalities, youth, education, commerce, national security, health, civil society, agriculture, transportation, immigration, tourism, antiquities, and the state ministry for parliamentary affairs.
They have a Ministry of Civil Society? Quick, someone alert Jurgen Habermas! Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami wrote a work on civil society in the Habermasian school, which has been influential for some Iraqi Shiites. Khatami had lived many years in Germany and studied the great Frankfurt School sociologist. Habermas wrote of the "public sphere," but that overlaps with the idea of civil society. Someone should add Habermas and Craig Calhoun to the wikipedia article on the subject. (At least one other government has a ministry responsible for "civil society"-- Belize.)
Qasim Da'ud is now among the leading candidates to be minister of the interior. Da'ud had held security positions under the Interim Governing Council and in the interim government of Iyad Allawi, and had advocated the suppression of the Sadr movement, so that he has been opposed by the Sadrist bloc in parliament so far. But Da'ud is backed by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
The Kurdistan Alliance has the foreign ministry and the ministries of water resources, industry, housing and reconstruction, and culture.
The Iraqi Accord Front of religious Sunnis has already named its ministers-- Ali Ghalib Baban for the ministry of planning, Rafi` al-`Isawi for the ministry of state for foreign affairs, Faruq `Abdul Qadir for the ministry of state for civil society, and Dr. Muhammad Mubarak for ministry of higher education.
The secular Iraqi National List will get the ministries of communication, justice, sciences, and human rights. It may also be given a fifth to make it happy (i.e. so it will pledge to support Maliki as prime minister). Likely ministers include Usamah al-Najafi, Wa'il `Abdul Latif, and Mahdi al-Hafidh.
The secular ex-Baathists of the National Dialogue Front are being offered the ministries of the environment, women, and national dialogue, and if it accepts them, one will go to a woman. So far NDC leader Salih Mutlak is rejecting the offered ministries and saying that his party has decided to be in the opposition.
Earlier on, spokesmen Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers have 32 seats in parliament, had said that it was a "red line" with them that the National Iraqi List of Allawi and the ex-Baath Sunnis of the National Dialogue Front be excluded from the government. Later on the Sadrists backed off that and said that they only objected to Allawi himself having a post. (Allawi will chair the National Security Council, which is not a cabinet position, but you could say he will be in the government.) Sadr's red lines seem to have collapsed, perhaps in part because Nuri al-Maliki feels less beholden to the Sadrists than did Ibrahim Jaafari. But given that the United Iraqi Alliance only had 132 fairly sure votes going in to these negotiations, and needs 138 to survive a vote of no confidence, Maliki is not in a position to turn down support if he wants a government that will not immediately fall. Now he seems to have lost the 15 votes of the Virtue Party, which makes him even more in need of allies from outside his party. The Sadrists have a choice of supporting Maliki's government of national unity and having control of some ministries or of being powerless and penniless in the opposition. Parliamentary logic tells against red lines.
There is speculation that the fifth post given to Allawi's list will be Defense. But Usamah Najafi and Hajim al-Hasani, Sunni Arabs from the Iraqi Accord Front, are still in the running. The religious Sunni Arabs are complaining bitterly that they have been cheated in the allocation of cabinet posts, which is arguably true. On the other hand, it is Maliki's government, and he has to support politicians who are likely to vote with him, and on most issues the Iraqi Accord Front will not.
Meanwhile, the civil war dragged on, with bombings, shootings and kidnappings all around the country, especially Baghdad, Baqubah, Kirkuk, Karbala and Fallujah.
Al-Hayat says that there has been a fresh wave of assassinations in Fallujah, and that five bodies were found there Wednesday morning. They had been volunteering to join the army.
The Iraqi Kurds accused Turkey of shelling a village on the Iraqi side of the border. Turkey denied it. Turkey is worried about leftist PKK fighters holing up in Iraq and then striking into neighboring Turkey.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/18/2006 12:30:00 AM
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12 Comments:
"They have a Ministry of Civil Society? Quick, someone alert Jurgen Habermas!"
Next: Ministry of Civil War...?
I just heard Al Franken again praise the idea put forth most recently by Biden & Gelb that the problems of Iraq can be solved by dividing it into three parts. According to my understanding, limited as it is, this proposal is both self-contradictory and dangerously facile. For one thing, such a division could have been carried out at any time from the end of WWI until the rise of the Baath Party. For a cluster of very good reasons, it was not done:
1) Turkey would never stand for an autonomous Kurdistan;
2) Ditto for Iran;
3) Such a division ignores the existence of the Turkmen, Assyrians, and other smaller minorities;
4) An autonomous Shia region in the south could only come into being over the dead bodies of the Saudi royal family, because the main Arabian oil wells are in the majority Shia region immediately adjacent to southern Iraq;
5) Like every other division of former British colonies, it would lead to ethnic cleansing on a vast scale;
6) A tripartite division of the country assumes what it denies, which is that there is a coherent, unified Iraqi nation-state.
What do you think about the currency of this idea? I think it suggests something that is not the case, which is that there is a straightforward solution to the mess Bush has created. Therefore, it would be a shame if Democrats adopted it as a strategy.
Tony Gerard
Silver City, New Mexico
I just heard Al Franken again praise the idea put forth most recently by Biden & Gelb that the problems of Iraq can be solved by dividing it into three parts. According to my understanding, limited as it is, this proposal is both self-contradictory and dangerously facile. For one thing, such a division could have been carried out at any time from the end of WWI until the rise of the Baath Party. For a cluster of very good reasons, it was not done:
1) Turkey would never stand for an autonomous Kurdistan;
2) Ditto for Iran;
3) Such a division ignores the existence of the Turkmen, Assyrians, and other smaller minorities;
4) An autonomous Shia region in the south could only come into being over the dead bodies of the Saudi royal family, because the main Arabian oil wells are in the majority Shia region immediately adjacent to southern Iraq;
5) Like every other division of former British colonies, it would lead to ethnic cleansing on a vast scale;
6) A tripartite division of the country assumes what it denies, which is that there is a coherent, unified Iraqi nation-state.
What do you think about the currency of this idea? I think it suggests something that is not the case, which is that there is a straightforward solution to the mess Bush has created. Therefore, it would be a shame if Democrats adopted it as a strategy.
Tony Gerard
Silver City, New Mexico
Juan,
could you please add come commentary and info about this aljazeera.COM report?
Mossad murdered 530 Iraqi scientists
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=11311
I try not to pay much attention to the aljazeeras as a primary source of info - but I sense we are going to be hearing more about this story in the future.
Why don't they just invent as many (non-functioning) ministries as there are parliamentarians and give everyone a title?
I find it very hard to believe that, as the civil war rages and people suffer, many Iraqis are going to take this "government" very seriously. Does the product of this extended charade carry a shred of legitimacy?
"Though Iraqi politicians are dismissing any need to comply with that clause. Once you are in the Old Boys Club, who needs a mere constitution?"
I guess they are following the Bush administration's example....
Why is it that the National Dialog Front is an ëx-Baathist" party? What is the evidence that this is exclusively ex-Baathist, and what sort of ex-Baathist do you include?
Iraqi seculars, from the Sunni side, would be members and voters of this party. It is inconceivable that all Sunni seculars were Saddam operatives, as the label ëx-Baathist" suggests. There is no such evidence.
We don't negotiate with terrorists. We negotiate with Libya. We do negotiate with terrorists? Libya is not a terrorist state?
The PKK are terrorists. Those who harbor terrorists are just as guilty as the terrorists. We harbor the PKK. We are just as guilty as the terrorists.
In the Suskind/O'Neill book (or was it Frum's book) Dubya said "I don't negotiate with myself." Who knew he was being consistent with the doctrine of not negotiating with terrorists?
PKK are terrorists when they attack Turkey, freedom fighters when they attack Iran.
Permute above observations at will and call it a foreign policy.
"It is being alleged that Prime Minister designate Nuri al-Maliki will present his cabinet to parliament on Saturday. If he fails, according to the constitution, the president will have to ask someone else to form the government. (Though Iraqi politicians are dismissing any need to comply with that clause. Once you are in the Old Boys Club, who needs a mere constitution?)"
==
It's at least a _little_ more complicated than that, although it is nice to see the structural and procedural side of the quagmire getting more attention than usual. I look forward to Saturday with great interest, myself, although probably not many will share my proceduralist tastes. (Doesn't somebody in Sir Walter Scott somewhere burble with glee at the prospect of some "jolly litigation"? That's me, more or less.)
Anyway, the Old Boys certainly don't need any Khalilzad Constitution to tell them what to do for themselves, but the scrap of parchment can still come in handy when they want to immobilize somebody else. The contraption in question seems to be all brakes and no engine, the exact opposite of Macaulay's famous "all sail and no anchor" remark as applied to our own 1787 counterpart.
If you happen to know the ancient Polish system, it becomes difficult to think about Green Zone politics without being reminded of the _nie pozwalam_ and the _zlota wolnosc_, the "I do not permit" (_liberum veto_ in Latin) and the "golden freedom." Once the Poles had ingeniously made quite sure the Polish State could never act significantly, they had to find something illegal or hyperlegal or metalegal that could act, and so they came up with "confederations," _konfederacje_, which correspond reasonably well to the "sectarian militias" that notoriously infest Republican Party Iraq.
What these formal resemblances mean is not too clear, I admit. The GOP occupiers can not have consciously modeled their legislation on the _Rzeczpospolita_ of yore, and at the bottom of the "Sarmatian" absurdity there lay feudalism and class interest, not religious and ethnic divisions. (Although there were plenty of those around too.)
Happy days.
--JHM
PS. If anybody actually tried to obey the Khalilzad Constitution, it is not completely obvious what would be required of them:
Article (74):
1st -- The president assigns the candidate of the parliamentary majority to form a Cabinet during the first 15 days from the date of the first session of the Council of Representatives. (With the exception in the case mentioned in subsection b in the 2nd section of article 70 in this constitution so that the assignment comes within 15 days from the day of the electing of the president.)
2nd-- The prime minister is assigned to name members of his Cabinet within a period of 30 days, at the longest, from the date of the assignment.
3rd -- The president assigns a new candidate to be the prime minister within 15 days if the prime minister assigned to form the cabinet during the period mentioned in the 2nd clause fails.
4th -- The assigned prime minister presents the names of the members of his cabinet and its ministerial platform to the Council of Representatives. He is considered to have won confidence when his ministers are approved individually and his ministerial platform is approved by an absolute majority.
5th -- The president will take up the assigning of another candidate to form a cabinet within 15 days if the Cabinet does not win confidence.
==
The big puzzle is at "4th." Is Nuri/Jawad Kamal (&c. &c.) al-Maliki really going to have to present a "ministerial platform" -- some sort of policy document, presumably that would be, to judge only from the English words -- as well as a list of names and offices? Will there then have to be thirty-eight (38) separate votes of confidence, one on each of the thirty-four ministers, one on the Prime Minister, two on Deputy Prime Ministers, and finally one on the ministerial platform, the whole show to come to a stop if an "absolute majority" should be lacking on any one of the above?
Why, even the ancient Poles never thought of _that_!
Might the Ministry of Civil Society mean religious affairs? Is the appointee a cleric or fundamentalist?
A Ministry of Immigration? Do al Zarqawi & crew bother with visas? What sort of papers do Iranian pilgrims use to visit shrines?
Tourism? Antiquities? Why not merge the two offices? Sadly, neither can one imagine much activity over the near term. But, oh, maybe people who berate bad news about Iraq should all book tours and prove their optimism.
Separately:
It is well known that Iraqi academics suffered persecution before and after Saddam's removal. Many have died. However, the allegation that Mossad would be behind this, or that the Pentagon would know and sanction this, is ludicrous. Most of the vicitms have nothing to do with any weapons technology
Al Jazeera seems to have pasted two independent stories into one. The first is an allegation that Mossad and / or the US wanted to "dispatch" weapons scientists in the Saddam era. Perhaps so, but the details seem imaginary. The 2nd story derives from a report issued by a Dr. Jalili early this year. He observed and protested the alarming number of deaths, but NOT attribute the deaths to anyone in particular.
Some in the Arab Street blame Israel for 9/11, the Samara bombings, and -- you name it. Al Jazeera panders to this. It is really sick.
Baathists and fundamentalist fanatics, not Mossad, are surely the authors of most of the deaths of professors. All sorts of purges and score settling followed the overthrow of Saddam. The victims are surely a mix of innocents, secular Shia, and Baath turncoats that took over the vacant slots or dared to de-Baathify the system.
If the US or Israel wanted to pull of some stealthy "hits" against mortal enemies, the inability to get al Zarqawi shows there is no competence in this regard. Bremer was unable to capture Muqtada. Secular Iraqi academics would not be on the list at all.
Even if they formed a great government tomorrow, it would still have been too costly.
But that is still far off.
And we all know it.
redjade:
Mossad murdered 530 Iraqi scientists
Earlier I saw a reference posted to The BrusselsTribunal which gives a lot of depth to this story. I don't know why the comment with that link has been removed from this section. Why has it Juan?
I have not waded through everything that is there, but it certainly lends a lot of credence to the theory that the violent chaos in Iraq is in very large part due to the US playing "The Salvador Option" there, i.e. sponsoring the terrorism there.
Check it out. I'm surprised that Juan Cole is not taking up the plight of academics in Iraq. He is certainly concerned about those in the US who are being smeared by The Israel Lobby, and by those in Israel who are being threatened by boycott. You'd think that the academics in Iraq who are being murdered might merit some similar attention.
The Brussels Tribunal has published a report by Dr Ismail Jalilil an Iraqi opthalmic surgeon, which seems to be one of the sources of the Al Jazeera article.
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