The Cost and Hope of the Iraqi Elections

I write this week’s column as Iraqis vote in their first national elections since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. The price of the elections was and continues to be high. More than 5000 American and coalition soldiers lost their lives in Iraq between 2003 and 2011. Many more Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians also died since 2003. Today in the town of Baiji, an Iraqi policeman gave his life to save voters from a suicide bomber, tackling the terrorist and shielding others with his body as the suicide vest was detonated.

Iraqis deserve a fair election that puts in place leaders who govern to help their country and their people. The vast majority of Iraqis I’ve met do not like the politics of fear and sectarian hatred. Arabs in Kurdistan feel welcomed and many throughout the country are eager to learn Kurdish. Kurdish classes in Baghdad cannot even meet the popular demand there. Sunni Arabs have begun to understand how Kurds and Shiites felt alienated and afraid of the central government in Baghdad, and their relations with Kurdistan and understanding of decentralized federalism have both improved markedly. Iraqi Shiite religious leaders, meanwhile, never accepted past governments’ pressure to issue fatwas against the Kurds, and today one is still hard pressed to find any signs in them of chauvinism or hatred towards the Kurds. Sunnis and Shiites also intermarry in large numbers in Iraq, and Turkmen I spoke with over the years circulate comfortably anywhere in the country. Christians, Yezidis and Kakais have faced serious problems especially in the last decade in Iraq, but even they will readily admit that the intolerance and violence they suffer comes from a minority of Iraqis.

Why then do Iraqi leaders seem to always fail their people? Has there simply been too much money to be made in Iraqi politics, first from American aid and now from oil, for average men and women to remain honest and fair? Does meddling from foreign states and the likes of al Qaeda turn Iraqi politics into a bloody parody of a sovereign state?  Are Iraq’s colonial origins, lumping different ethnicities and religions into an artificial British creation, to blame? Has the legacy of Baathism and previous authoritarian governments made it impossible for Iraqis to really absorb the spirit of democracy?

I do not know the answers to these questions, of course. I am fairly certain, however, that Prime Minister Maliki’s answer – a more strongly centralized government in Baghdad wherein he controls all the key levers of power – is not the solution to the country’s problems. Iraqis had some eighty years to try that approach, with often appalling results.  At the same time, most Iraqis – with the exception of the Kurds – do not want partition of the country. 

Writing in al Monitor on April 30 (“Iraqi election could lead to partition”), Mustafa al-Kadhimi wonders where the middle ground between Baghdad-based authoritarianism and partition might lie:

A realistic solution would be to balance the center, the regions and the provinces. The needed balance among the legislative and executive powers and the laws would prevent a person or a party from monopolizing power. Achieving such a balance requires consensus, and this would be different from agreeing to divide the ministries, the departments and the quotas. Rather, consensus would mean an agreement that preserves the country’s unity, and that agreement can be reached if everyone makes concessions.

What too many people seem to forget is that such a balance, based on concessions and a high a level of consensus, was already arrived at nine years ago: it is called the Iraqi Constitution. The constitutional referendum saw 78.59% of Iraqis accept the new social and political contract, and the mostly Sunni Arab areas who voted ‘no’ at the time have now come to embrace the Constitution. One simply does not get more consensus than that, especially in countries like Iraq. What’s more, the Constitution balanced the powers of the central government, the regions, the governorates and the different branches of the government in Baghdad so that no one actor could monopolize power.

So what happened? Nuri al-Maliki and his ministers happened. As soon as they occupied the seats of power in Baghdad, they busied themselves by flouting the constitution and trying to concentrate as much power as they could into their own hands. Their mostly Shiite constituents quickly forgot what it feels like to be excluded and discriminated against, and cheered when promises to Kurds, Sunni Arabs, liberals, secularists and various regional politicians were broken time and time again.

Today’s election will help determine if this centrifugal process, carried out in the name of Iraqi unity, will continue.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).

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