Al-Maliki to Face No-Confidence Vote?
As Many as 150 Dead in "Turkmen Massacre"
Readers sometimes ask me if analyzing the news from Iraq every day doesn't get me down.
It got me down today. Sunni Arab guerrillas, unable to operate as effectively in Baghdad because of the US troop surge, had a suicide bomber drive a truck loaded with explosives into a market in a village on the fringes of the northern city of Tuz Khurmato and detonate his payload. As I write, authorities had counted 130 dead bodies, many of them women and children, and relatives reported another 20 dead. Another 250 or so were wounded, some of them badly, according to the Arabic daily al-Hayat. The latter says Iraqis are referring to the bombing as "the Turkmen massacre." Some 40 homes, 20 shops, and a dozen automobiles were also destroyed.
Like the detonation of the minarets at the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra recently, this act of terrorism had a strategic purpose. First, even 160,000 US troops cannot provide security to the whole country. The guerrillas are announcing that if they are prevented from operating in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, they will just shift operations to Samarra (an hour's drive due north of Baghdad) or Tuz Khurmato.
Moreover, they are saying that they are just as capable of waving a read flag in front of the Shiite bull even if they aren't in Baghdad. Thus, they hit a sacred Shiite shrine again at Samarra. And Tuz Khurmato is a largely Shiite Turkmen city of some 63,000, surrounded by villages with a similar composition, like the one that was blown up Saturday. Although Turkmen Shiites had in earlier decades been removed from the formal, clerically-dominated Shiism of Najaf, practicing instead a folk religion, in the 1990s Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr reached out to them and brought many of them into orthodox Twelver Shiism. Arab Shiites now feel solidarity with them, and on occasion young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has sent Mahdi Army fighters up to protect them. The Badr Corps of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council has also attempted to attract their loyalty. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki denounced the bombing as the work of Sunni extremists who declare that Shiite Muslims are actually infidels.
CBS News is reporting that on July 15, the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front will call a vote of no confidence in the Iraqi parliament against prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. CBS says that Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, who is spear-heading this move, met with US VP Dick Cheney and that Cheney may have approved the move.
There are three Sunni Arab parties in the 275-member parliament. The largest, with 44 seats, is the Iraqi Accord Front. The National Dialogue Front of Salih al-Mutlak has 11 seats. The small Liberation and Reconciliation Party has 3 seats (its founder, Mishaan al-Jibouri has had to flee the country because a warrant was issued for his arrest last fall). According to the Iraqi constitution, any 50 members of parliament can call a vote of no confidence, so the Sunni Arab parties can certainly initiate the process.
They would need 138 seats to unseat al-Maliki, however, and it is not clear that they would have them. The 58 Kurdish deputies will vote for al-Maliki, and he would only need 80 Shiite votes to win the vote. Even with the defection from his alliance of 32 Sadrist MPs and 15 from the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila), al-Maliki probably still has 80 Shiite MPs behind him (before the defections he had about 130 in his United Iraqi Alliance, so the defections should have left him with 88). It is also not clear that the Sadrist and Islamic Virtue MPs will actually vote with Sunni fundamentalist parties to unseat a Shiite prime minister.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that al-Maliki has put together an alliance of 'moderate' parties, including the Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (Shiite, leans toward Iran), and the Kurdistan Alliance. Da'wa has 24 seats in parliament, SIIC has 30, and the Kurds have 58. That gives them 112. For a stable government they need another 26 at least. There are some Shiite independents in the United Iraqi Alliance that still support al-Maliki, and he is hoping to peel off one of the three parties (the Iraqi Islamic Party) that make up the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front, so as to put him over the top. (When he made these plans, I don't think al-Maliki realized that the Iraq Islamic Party's head, VP Tariq al-Hashimi, was planning to try to unseat him). So it is close, but al-Maliki may still have a simple majority behind him.
You have to wonder, though, how long it will last. Another wild card is that a lot of parliamentarians are out of town or out of country for the summer now, and parliament has difficulty raising a quorum. That so many parliamentarians are not attending might allow al-Maliki's enemies to unseat him if his own supporters stay in Amman or London for the vote.
How all this fits with al-Maliki's denunciation of the Mahdi Army or paramilitary of the Sadr Movement is unclear. It may be that al-Maliki hopes the move will help bring the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party into his coalition. If so he may have made a grave calculation, if the Sunnis really are planning on calling a vote of no confidence. Al-Maliki may have failed to get the IIP aboard and may have alienated Sadrist MPs that might otherwise have grudgingly supported him. Just speculation.
The Sadrist Movement denounced al-Maliki's denunciation of them, according to al-Hayat, saying that it was a smokescreen intended to take the public's mind off the government's massive failures in restoring security to Iraq.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/08/2007 12:35:00 AM
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8 Comments:
Obviously the US has given up on a Shia led democratic government that follows Islamic law and probably hope to install a secular Sunni strong man not named Saddam Hussein to rule Iraq under martial law. Our Sunni allies will be happy, and this makes it easier to sell the idea that the enemy are the Shia's and Al Qaeda, ie Iran, Hizzbollah, Shia militias in Iraq, etc., and those that support them, or at least those that support them, like Syria.
So a war against Iran, Syria and Hizzbollah seems to be inevitable in the coming months, or at least before next 2008 November, probably after some "event" that can be blamed on Iran.
Support for Maliki is contingent on him getting US support, and he goes if the US hints that he should go. There is no ideology here, backing a loser is bad business in the most corrupt state on earth.
His denounciation of Sadr is an attempt to weaken the Sadrists. He is now accusing them of being infiltrated by Ba'thist! [see, in Arabic:]
http://www.radiosawa.com/arabic_news.aspx?id=1307795&cid=2
So, one can assume that he is not confident to stay without a large scale defection from the Sadrists to the "moderates" (a hilarious description given that the leaders can be most accurately described as terrorist; traitors; and extremists.) I think this is out of desperation rather than calculations, and that he is only staying because the others may be just as bad.
The only way Iraq can be put to right is to withdraw sovereignty and replace the government with an international group of professionals. Once oil revenues are outside the reach of the political mafias, they will disintegrate.
Kurdistan should be given full independence and be awarded US funding to prevent it from failing. The US can have wall-to-wall military bases there with no local objections or fear from attacks against them.
The USA and its co-conspirators must be disqualified from getting involved in the rest of Iraq in any way, shape, or form.
A civil war between the militias is actually an improvement on their war against the Iraqi civilians now, and they will fizzle out without the oil money and out of exhaustion.
Cheney didn't want the Iraqis to recess for the summer. Might calling for a confidence vote snap the MPs abroad into rushing down to Baghdad to vote? And once they're there, why not pass a few laws, eh?
Anybody think that idea has some merit? I find it hard to see how Cheney would gain much by the fall of a recent and relatively young government
Today, marking a mini-milestone, a NYT editorial declares: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit."
The Administration will manage, one way or another, to delay genuine pullout during the remainder of its term. They will even manage to continue ample disbursements to contractors for work that will never be finished or require demolition upon departure.
Then, in early 2009, when the blame for mishaps can be pinned on Democrats, Foxs News, the WSJ, Weekly Standard, National Review, AEI, American Spectator, and talk radio world will all begin to chime in and urge speedy exit.
However, if 160k US troops could not secure Iraq, the question is what entity, if any, will do this as the US pulls out. It is probably no big deal to assure basic border integrity or suppress the formation of rival troop formations, but small assaults, sabotage, and bombings of civilian sites might go on indefinitely and discredit a central government.
The truck and car bombings are quite persistent and represent a glaring forensic failure. Step one for any security force would be to identify and impound all potential explosive materials, and as many small weapons as possible. No "training" required. A salaried police force has proven useless. Just play Al Capone in reverse: pay a bounty to ex-soldiers for each unit of materials and weapons found, seized, and delivered. Spontaneous gang structures will evolve into efficient for-profit counter-insurgent allies.
The other question will be how to handle the refugee crisis. Will the humanitarian impulse outweigh xenophobia or the risk of backlash if even 0.5% of those granted US residency bear grudges that eventually result in violence?
Strategic guerilla bombings
Mass introduction of strategic bombers was one of the most important technological results of WW2. Now, 60+ years later, memories of mass bombings of European cities are still alive, and strategic bombers remain in the core of the modern air force.
Unfortunately, now we face a real big guerilla war unfolding in Iraq and around it, and this war has already delivered its ultimate strategic weapons – mosque and truck bombings. In fact, destruction of a major religious site, such as Samarra Mosque, is as horribly important as a complete destruction of a major city! Let us admit this, cultural bias aside, destruction of the Samarra Mosque is at least as disastrous as destruction of WTC.
Truck bombs are also deadly effective in their symbolic impact on the civilan population. Exactly as mosque atatcks, they demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the current rule and there is nothing much that can be done about this. Attacks of this kind do not need either Western-savvy operatives or advanced technical skills like jet piloting – everything is done locally with simplest means used.
Absence of new 9-11-like attacks is often cited as a success in GWOT. Sure, we can only hope that nothing like this will ever happen again, but the most likely conclusion is that 9-11 was just not intended as a direct precendent for future attacks! Mosque bombings are completely different, and, unfortunately, incomparably easier to reproduce. In this respect, they are worse than infamous plane hijackings.
The danger of these developments is that checking and searching of each and every truck is simply unimaginable. As for religious sites, they can be secured, but the problem is, impact of every successful attack is much worse than that of a plane hijacking.
The real purpose of strategic guerilla bombings has little to do with the “battle of wills” we all know from the neoconservative PR. What guerillas want to crash is not absract will of the other side to fight, but concrete occupation strategies, rules of engagement and overall initiative. At this point, it is really hard to imagine what can prevent the Iraqi insurgents from having their strategic goals achieved for as long as the conflict lasts.
Professeur Cole, I've been reading you daily for a long time but have never commented before. Most of your commentators are educated, worldly, erudite people, so I always felt that anything I had to add was redundant. Even now, I'm hesitant, yet feel compelled. What in God's, Allah's, Quatzecoatl's, Shiva's, Gitchimanitou's, Ganesh's, Confusious's, Budhha's etc name have we wrought? What gives us the right? Every day I come here, and every day I despair. Why?????
Shades of the 1963 Diem Coup in South Vietnam!
as far as pft says that attacking Iran is going to happen in the next few months after some'event' - the newest indication that the AEI is still pushing for it is the interview of Mr Richard Perle with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on 7.7.07 - in which he is claiming that in 3 days it would be done...
I do not speak Polish but invite others to check on this news.
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