Secular leaders can be just as dangerous as Islamists in this game of geopolitical Jenga.
If you were watching Iraqi television early on Monday evening, you would have missed the end of the Iraq war. There were no live shots of the last US soldier crossing into Kuwait. No anguished chat show discussions about whether the war was worth it. Instead, there was some particularly dramatic reality television.
Three men spoke to the camera, explaining that they had planted roadside bombs and used silenced pistols to assassinate key officials. Ordinarily, this would hardly be worthy of prime-time: this December, around 230 civilians have already been killed. But what made these claims so potent was the alleged taskmaster: Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s vice-president, and the most senior Sunni politician in a Shia majority country. It’s a little like Nick Clegg paying hitmen to bump off key Tories.
If this seems like interesting timing, it’s because it’s supposed to be. Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s increasingly ambitious Shia prime minister, waited until the US withdrawal was complete. Then he pounced, issuing an arrest warrant for Hashimi.
To understand the brewing political crisis, we should remember a few important things. First, Iraq is not really a normal democracy – it’s a negotiated state, delicately balanced between assorted ethnicities and sects. It’s a game of geopolitical Jenga, in which the removal of one block, a single Sunni leader, can bring the whole edifice crashing down. That’s why Hashimi, after being put under the cosh, suddenly turned up in a northern part of Iraq controlled by the Kurdish authorities. He knew that Baghdad couldn’t touch him there. He’s now a fugitive from his own government.
This is not some strange and primitive Arab phenomenon. Political scientists call it “consociationalism”, a type of power-sharing, and we can see it in action from Belgium to Singapore. Iraq’s politics are shaped by an agreement made in 2005, distributing the presidency to the Kurds, the prime ministership to the Shias and the parliamentary speaker role to the Sunnis. The problem is that this situation becomes much more volatile when guns, rather than an impartial civil service, keep the balance.
It’s also problematic when one faction is happy to turn the state’s firepower on another. For a long time, Iraq’s interior ministry was running Shia death squads to attack Sunni political rivals. So it’s not hard to believe that a Sunni politician might also have dabbled in assassination to get ahead. But there’s probably something more troubling going on here, and it contains a lesson for Egypt and Libya, too.
The Arab uprisings have provoked wild-eyed frenzy about the coming Islamic tide. The Muslim Brotherhood, goes the argument, are fair-weather democrats itching to dissolve Egypt’s new representative institutions. But Iraq, like Afghanistan, teaches us that dour, secular strongmen can be every bit as dangerous as charismatic Islamists.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai was once the darling of the international community. Now he’s reportedly toying with the idea of pulling a Putin – changing the constitution to run for a third term. Karzai was re-elected in 2009 amid massive electoral fraud, to which he responded by seizing control of the independent electoral commission.
Similarly in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki has gone rogue. Aside from chasing down his vice-president, Maliki has also demanded that parliament pass a vote of no-confidence in the Sunni deputy prime minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq, who called him a “dictator” on television. Even before that, the prime minister was rounding up hundreds of Sunni opponents, running secret jails, and arresting university professors.
The Sunni-backed Iraqiya party – which won the most seats in 2010, but couldn’t fashion a majority – was already boycotting Iraq’s parliament in protest at these excesses. Now it’s pulled its ministers out of government in response to the arrest warrant. The Kurds are also clashing with central government, having signed their own oil deals with foreign companies.
Are these the fruits of a cowardly foreign policy? Is President Obama throwing away the hard-won gains of the Bush years? Hardly. US forces would have been a useful buffer, but they were obliged to leave under a 2008 agreement signed by Bush. Obama tried to secure an extension, but Iraq refused to give American troops immunity or publicly justify their presence. Obama couldn’t have risked his soldiers’ lives under such conditions.
Four years ago, Iraq was torn apart by a civil war. Baghdad was ethnically cleansed of Sunnis. Four million Iraqis were displaced and al-Qaeda went on the rampage. It was a nightmare as dark as Saddam’s torture chambers and massacres. Eventually, a political solution was cobbled together. It was buttressed by the famous surge of US forces and the “Sunni Awakening”, in which key Sunni tribes turned on Sunni militants. Now, those fissiparous forces are returning.
Iraq should survive this particular crisis. Sunnis won’t casually abandon their stake in government, and Shias will take a step back from the brink. But if Maliki continues to chip away at the blocks of Iraq’s political settlement, the whole thing will eventually tumble down. This is the Iraq for which 179 British soldiers gave their lives – increasingly authoritarian, a vassal of Iran next door, and now falling apart at the seams.
If you were watching Iraqi television early on Monday evening, you would have missed the end of the Iraq war. There were no live shots of the last US soldier crossing into Kuwait. No anguished chat show discussions about whether the war was worth it. Instead, there was some particularly dramatic reality television.
Three men spoke to the camera, explaining that they had planted roadside bombs and used silenced pistols to assassinate key officials. Ordinarily, this would hardly be worthy of prime-time: this December, around 230 civilians have already been killed. But what made these claims so potent was the alleged taskmaster: Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s vice-president, and the most senior Sunni politician in a Shia majority country. It’s a little like Nick Clegg paying hitmen to bump off key Tories.
If this seems like interesting timing, it’s because it’s supposed to be. Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s increasingly ambitious Shia prime minister, waited until the US withdrawal was complete. Then he pounced, issuing an arrest warrant for Hashimi.
To understand the brewing political crisis, we should remember a few important things. First, Iraq is not really a normal democracy – it’s a negotiated state, delicately balanced between assorted ethnicities and sects. It’s a game of geopolitical Jenga, in which the removal of one block, a single Sunni leader, can bring the whole edifice crashing down. That’s why Hashimi, after being put under the cosh, suddenly turned up in a northern part of Iraq controlled by the Kurdish authorities. He knew that Baghdad couldn’t touch him there. He’s now a fugitive from his own government.
This is not some strange and primitive Arab phenomenon. Political scientists call it “consociationalism”, a type of power-sharing, and we can see it in action from Belgium to Singapore. Iraq’s politics are shaped by an agreement made in 2005, distributing the presidency to the Kurds, the prime ministership to the Shias and the parliamentary speaker role to the Sunnis. The problem is that this situation becomes much more volatile when guns, rather than an impartial civil service, keep the balance.
It’s also problematic when one faction is happy to turn the state’s firepower on another. For a long time, Iraq’s interior ministry was running Shia death squads to attack Sunni political rivals. So it’s not hard to believe that a Sunni politician might also have dabbled in assassination to get ahead. But there’s probably something more troubling going on here, and it contains a lesson for Egypt and Libya, too.
The Arab uprisings have provoked wild-eyed frenzy about the coming Islamic tide. The Muslim Brotherhood, goes the argument, are fair-weather democrats itching to dissolve Egypt’s new representative institutions. But Iraq, like Afghanistan, teaches us that dour, secular strongmen can be every bit as dangerous as charismatic Islamists.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai was once the darling of the international community. Now he’s reportedly toying with the idea of pulling a Putin – changing the constitution to run for a third term. Karzai was re-elected in 2009 amid massive electoral fraud, to which he responded by seizing control of the independent electoral commission.
Similarly in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki has gone rogue. Aside from chasing down his vice-president, Maliki has also demanded that parliament pass a vote of no-confidence in the Sunni deputy prime minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq, who called him a “dictator” on television. Even before that, the prime minister was rounding up hundreds of Sunni opponents, running secret jails, and arresting university professors.
The Sunni-backed Iraqiya party – which won the most seats in 2010, but couldn’t fashion a majority – was already boycotting Iraq’s parliament in protest at these excesses. Now it’s pulled its ministers out of government in response to the arrest warrant. The Kurds are also clashing with central government, having signed their own oil deals with foreign companies.
Are these the fruits of a cowardly foreign policy? Is President Obama throwing away the hard-won gains of the Bush years? Hardly. US forces would have been a useful buffer, but they were obliged to leave under a 2008 agreement signed by Bush. Obama tried to secure an extension, but Iraq refused to give American troops immunity or publicly justify their presence. Obama couldn’t have risked his soldiers’ lives under such conditions.
Four years ago, Iraq was torn apart by a civil war. Baghdad was ethnically cleansed of Sunnis. Four million Iraqis were displaced and al-Qaeda went on the rampage. It was a nightmare as dark as Saddam’s torture chambers and massacres. Eventually, a political solution was cobbled together. It was buttressed by the famous surge of US forces and the “Sunni Awakening”, in which key Sunni tribes turned on Sunni militants. Now, those fissiparous forces are returning.
Iraq should survive this particular crisis. Sunnis won’t casually abandon their stake in government, and Shias will take a step back from the brink. But if Maliki continues to chip away at the blocks of Iraq’s political settlement, the whole thing will eventually tumble down. This is the Iraq for which 179 British soldiers gave their lives – increasingly authoritarian, a vassal of Iran next door, and now falling apart at the seams.