Iraq after the elections (19 February 2005)

Published in Labour Left Briefing (March 2005)

Competitive elections or US-favoured elites mobilising to occupy the political structures? Glen Rangwala offers an assessment.

Just before the elections in Iraq, President Bush took the unusual step of heavily promoting a truly banal book by an Israeli far rightist cabinet minister. "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy read Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy," Bush told the Washington Times, and many others subsequently. "It's a great book." A simplistic tract which separates the world into good and evil, in which democracies all fall into the first camp and all non-democracies are lumped together as producers terrorism – and thus through the war on terror, must be removed – seems to have the status of a new doctrine by which the Bush administration will conduct its foreign policy.

Some may think that it is hypocritical for someone who has been a minister for most of the past 10 years in a government that continues to occupy the land of another people, and who himself has voted against almost all attempts to return slivers of that territory to that people, to be preaching the virtues of democracy. Not so: occupation of another people's land is not a problem for Sharansky. What matters (and from the book, it appears, all that matters) is the freedom to dissent in public. So as long as Israel doesn't stop an individual Palestinian from being able to speak his opposition to the occupation, then Israel is doing nothing wrong in keeping its occupation in place.

The Sharansky doctrine, then, is alive and kicking in the Bush administration's policy towards the Iraqi elections. Anybody could stand for election – but only Iyad Allawi's Iraqi List, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) of the Shi'a parties, and the Kurdish list have the backing of the funds and facilities of the US or the religious establishment to back them up in order for any voters to know who they are. The new government will have to work closely with the occupation, as the US still has de facto control over the vast majority of the armed forces and the funds of Iraq. But the fact that the elections were anything but fair, and that the country remains under an open-ended occupation, didn't stop Bush and Blair from trumpeting the advent of democracy à la Sharansky in Iraq.

The relatively high turnout of 58% for elections to the National Assembly was no surprise: as sectarian identities have been fostered through the occupation, the politicians who have had a role in Iraq since the occupation have all promoted themselves as representative of their sect or ethnic group, and able to bring benefits to it. Before the invasion, few Iraqis identified themselves primarily on the basis of their sect; now, a very great number do. Members of individual sects who were backed by the US banded together on joint electoral slates, and campaigned for votes on that basis. The elections therefore became little more than a competition of which sect would be able to get hold of the structures of government, more a struggle to assert demography rather than a statement of popular opinion.

This is demonstrated by the way in which voting occurred in each province. In the northernmost province, Dohuk, the single Kurdish list took over 95% of the vote; in two provinces south of Baghdad, Najaf and Babil, the Shi'a list took almost 80% of the vote. There was no real competition in any of the provinces over whom to vote for – populations were brought out en masse to vote as part of their confessional or ethnic allegiance. Activists arguing for a set of progressive policies didn’t have the funds or resources in the conflict-ridden country to promote their message.

Bush's favoured reading material tells him that elections will bring an end to terrorism, but this is a fantasy. The elections, clearly, will not bring an end to political violence in Iraq: the success of parties that are based upon sectarian and ethnic identities will, if anything, exacerbate tensions between the groups, as they seek to steer resources and political benefits to their own constituents. Bush claimed in his State of the Union address in January that the insurgency comprised of "a small group of extremists", a claim which didn’t sit comfortably with the assessment by Iraq’s own national intelligence chief, General Mohammad Abdullah Shahwani, that it was made up of more than 200,000 people. Israeli cabinet ministers may tell Bush that elections will bring an end to the war, but it will take much more, and much longer, than that both for the US and for Israel whilst their occupations remains intact.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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