Iraq War: The election results

One of the thing I appreciate about Juan Cole's writing on Iraq, the Middle East and Islam is that he keeps his eye on what's happening and doesn't go chasing after the ideological slogan of the moment.  That ability is very much on display in Juan Cole, "Theocracy Now," The American Prospect Online, Feb. 21, 2005.

Cole believes that the coming to power of a Shia majority in the January elections in Iraq represents a "political upheaval" whose significance is likely to match that of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  Obviously, the political situation there is still very much in flux.  But the following are some of the considerations he describes as worth keeping in mind.

The Bush administration tried to avoid having the nationwide elections, at least at such an early date.  It was the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his followers who insisted on the election.  Sistani,  a native Iranian, commands the reverence, even veneration, of most Iraqi Shia, according to Cole.

Because of the Sunni Arab boycott of the elections, the turnout wound up at around 57%.  The Shia turnout was high because, says Cole, "many Iraqi Shia said they voted in large part because of their fear of the hellfire with which their clergymen threatened them if they did not come out to the polls."  Opinion polls that did well in predicting patterns of voter turnout also indicated that 69% of the Shia and 82% of the the Sunni Arabs favored either an early or an immediate withdrawal of US troops, although there was still substantial support for American intervention among the Kurds in the north.  The electoral system was set up in a way that the Sunni Arab boycott left the Kurds and the Shia represented in the new assembly out of proportion to their numbers.

Cole takes a look at the two largest parties within the victorious United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), SCIRI (Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and the Dawa Party.  "Clearly," writes Cole, the implementation of "religious law will be high on their agenda."  This will likely mean significant restrictions on the rights of women, which Bush and Cheney and Rummy passionately support as long as it helps them justify a war they want to have.  I suspect that the new Shia-dominated government, installed thanks to US forces and probably still dependent for a long time on American troops to fight the Sunni Arab guerrillas, won't get much much resistance from the Bush administration on the matter of restricting the rights of women.

Cole gives several examples of what the could mean in practice, such as diminished protections for women in marriage law, restrictions on inheritance by women and legalization of polygamy.

Those kinds of rules fall under "personal status" law.  The Dawa Party in particular can be expected to push for shariah (Islamic law) in governing business and other social institutions.  Criminal law may also be covered by shariah in the new Iraq.

One of the distinctiosn that tends to get muffled in the ideological hype in America over the Iraqi election is the distinction between shariah and clerical rule.  In Iran, there is a form of clerical rule in that religious authorities have formal power to veto candidates for electoral office, for instance.  The Iraq Shia,  the Iranian Sistani included, tend not to favor that type of structure.  As Cole explains (my emphasis):

These Shia religious parties do not seek clerical rule. Rather, their major program is the implementation of their version of Islamic law [shariah]. This goal is more characteristic of political Islam worldwide than is clerical rule, which is rare and of which Iran is the main exemplar. Sudan’s fundamentalist military government, for instance, began imposing Islamic law in 1991, and ultimately enforced it even on Christians. Islamic legal thought is dynamic and often innovative, but adherents of political Islam most often pursue a rather literalist interpretation of it, often derived from medieval texts.

Cole has been dubious that a Kurdish secession attempt would be likely.  He has argued, unlike some other observers, that in the years since Britain patched together present-day Iraq from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Iraqis have developed a real sense of Iraqi nationalism.  He notes there that while the Kirkuk area in the Kurdish-dominated north is currently oil-rich but the fields are "old and declining," while the Rumayla fields in the Shia-dominated south are expected to produce most of Iraq's oil revenue in the future, a strong incentive for the Kurds to remain part of Iraq.

Still, he reminds us that there are serious risks ahead.  Even if the Kurds and Shia Arabs agree on a government and a common program, it could intensify the Sunni resistance.  He writes:

And in the short term, the threat of violence continues to loom. As United Nations envoy [the late] Lakhdar Brahimi noted in the spring of 2004 after speaking to the major party leaders, countries fall into civil turmoil inadvertently, not because it is planned out. Kirkuk is a tinderbox that could explode into urban faction fighting at the drop of a hat. Urban crowd violence is a bigger threat to U.S. military control than militias fighting a civil war. The United States could scramble AC-130 combat aircraft to stop set-piece battles by militiamen. It could not as easily deal with hundreds of thousands of civilians in the streets.

The election results, therefore, threaten to open all the cans of worms in Iraq simultaneously. Religious law, Kurdish autonomy, gender roles, and a whole host of burning issues will come immediately to the fore. If these are addressed in the spirit of parliamentary compromise, Iraqis have an opportunity to forge a new, multicultural Iraq that honors Islam without ramming it down people’s throats -- and that recognizes provincial rights without breaking up the country. If a spirit of intransigence and maximalism prevails among any major group, however, the country faces the most severe threats. And because Iraq is so central to the oil-producing Persian Gulf, its severe threats are severe threats to Americans as well.

Freedom is on the march in Iraq.  How much freedom and just for whom remains to be seen.  Even more doubtful is just how much the new Iraq will serve American foreign policy interests.  The Iraq War is far from over.