Rohan Pearce
According to a November 24 Boston Globe report, the Fallujah resistance has been led by "an electrician and a mosque preacher, both natives of the community". Yet the wave of violence and terror unleashed by the US-led occupation forces in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities has supposedly been in order to prepare for a "free election", scheduled for January 30, by ridding Iraq of "foreign terrorists".
Washington is gambling that the election will act as a pressure valve, defusing Iraqi hostility toward the US-led occupation, thus significantly reducing popular support for the armed resistance.
While Washington's preference would no doubt be its troops to be able to totally crush armed opposition to the occupation prior to the election, this seems unlikely. On the other hand, delaying the election would likely cause a mass explosion of Iraqi anger, particularly among Iraq's Shiite majority, whose senior political and religious leaders are banking on the election to boost their bargaining position with Washington.
The elections will be conducted with the entire country being considered a single electorate, helping to avoid a situation where Washington might have to deal with Iraqi legislators having strong connections to local communities where resistance to the occupation has been fierce.
This electoral system will also help ensure that Washington's preferred winners — many of whom are former CIA and Pentagon employees who have spent significant time in exile and have no mass political base within Iraq — are elected. Of the 212 parties that attempted to register for the election, 56 were knocked back by Iraq's US-appointed Independent Election Commission.
The single-constituency method of election for the new parliament has resulted in attempts to cobble together national slates. The key slates will be one based on Shiites aligned with Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani and a rival slate led by Iyad Allawi, the US-installed Iraqi prime minister, who leads the CIA-created Iraqi National Accord party.
Representatives of Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, have been negotiating with the two largest Shiite religious-political parties, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Party, both of which are represented in the US-installed Interim Government of Iraq (IGI).
According to a November 17 Associated Press report, Sistani is also negotiating with the Iraqi National Congress, whose leaders, headed by Ahmed Chalabi, had been favoured by the Pentagon chiefs to take power in post-invasion Iraq but who lost favour with the Bush administration when their support within Iraq proved to be near non-existent.
Although the Shiite slate looks likely to include groups whose attitude toward the occupation is, to say the least, ambivalent (SCIRI for example, was one of the eight groups eligible for funding under the US Congress's 1998 Iraq Liberation Act), Sistani's representatives have also been negotiating with Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army militia, which led an anti-occupation uprising in Najaf from April to August.
AP reported that "an 'initial' list of candidates was met with vehement opposition from political parties and that intense negotiations were underway to address their grievances. A major disagreement [sources said] centered on what the parties see as the large number of independent Shiites on the list. Al Sadr also was demanding that it be allowed to field more candidates than the roughly 20 his movement has been assigned."
At the same time as participating in an election tainted by a brutal US military offensive against the armed resistance, Sadr has accused the IGI of violating the terms of the Najaf ceasefire. AP reported that at a November 23 press conference in Baghdad, a Sadr aide, Ali Smeisim, accused the IGI of arresting supporters of Sadr's movement. "The government ... started pursuing them and their number in prisons have doubled", he told reporters. He said that Iraqi police had arrested 160 supporters of Sadr in Najaf four days earlier.
Washington faces the prospect of a widespread electoral boycott by Sunni Iraqis (estimated to be up to 30% of the country's Arab population). The influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars has issued a call for a boycott. On November 22, Sheik Faidh Mohamed Amin al Faidhi, a prominent AMS member, was murdered just one day after the IGI announced that the January 30 poll would go ahead. A day after Faidhi's assassination, Sheik Ghalib Ali al Zuhairi, another high-profile member of the AMS, was shot dead as he left a mosque in Muqdadiyah.
By contrast with the AMS boycott call, Sistani issued a fatwa (religious edict) in mid-October ordering Shiites to participate in the IGI-organised election.
If the AMS call for a Sunni boycott meets with significant success, Washington will be hard-pressed to present the resulting Iraqi parliament as a genuine expression of Iraqi public opinion. US officials hope to "finesse the problem with an Allawi-led slate that is 20 percent Sunni so that they will be represented even if they boycott the balloting", wrote David Ignatius in a November 25 op-ed for Lebanon's Daily Star.
If those with a some degree of independence from the US occupation regime, such as Sistani, are able to win a parliamentary majority, the 140,000 US troops occupying 'Iraq will act as a guarantor that Washington's will won't be thwarted. In addition, since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the US has been constructing a new Iraqi state in which all the key positions are filled by Washington-friendly figures.
While Washington hopes that the election will defuse Iraqi hostility toward its occupation, the opposite is just as likely. The Shiite majority's discontent is still being held in check by Sistani and the other "moderate" clerics and the promise of a Shiite-dominated government but when the occupation continues past the election, the Shiite hierarchy will either have to challenge the occupation or risk losing influence to those forces that demand an immediate withdrawal of the US-occupation forces.
In the lead-up to the election, Fallujah-style assaults by the occupation forces on communities with a significant presence of resistance fighters are likely to undermine any Iraqi political forces that become tainted by too close an association with the occupation forces.
From Green Left Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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