First Iraq Election Results Not Good News

I said there was no point in writing about the Iraqi elections until there was actually some data to base it on. Did the wingnut cheerleaders listen? 'Course they didn't. It was all "freedom reigns" and "purple fingers" and "We Win!". Mark Steyn drank all the kool-aid and then proclaimed idiotically:

One day Iraq will be a G7 member hosting the Olympics in the world's No. 1 luxury vacation resort of Fallujah, and the Defeaticrat Party will still be running around screaming it's a quagmire. It's not just that Iraq is going better than expected, but that it's a huge success that's being very deftly managed: The timeframe imposed on the democratic process turns out to have worked very well -- the transfer of sovereignty, the vote on a constitutional assembly, the ratification of the constitution, the vote for a legislature -- and, with the benefit of hindsight, it now looks like an ingeniously constructed way to bring the various parties on board in the right order: first the Kurds, then the Shia, now the Sunni.

Thing is, the first reports suggest that it isn't going to be that simple or that easy.

Let's begin with Riverbend, the Iraqi girl blogger, who says

More people are going to elect this time around- not because Iraqis suddenly believe in American-imposed democracy under occupation, but because the situation this last year has been intolerable. Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can't stand him.

and reminds us of an old Iraqi saying

“Ili ishuf il mout, yirdha bil iskhuna.” He who sees death, is content with a fever.

The Sunnis are voting for a fever, she says.

The Kuwait Times, just after the polls closed, ran an excellent op-ed by Alistair MacDonald which cuts through the bull to get to the heart of the matter.

"If there's an (Islamist) government, the US government will stay in a damage limitation strategy,"...The Americans will be happy to have Shiite participation but not in key administrations ... They don't want to see ... people with strong links to Iran in control of the decision-making process."

In other words, the Bush administration are praying for a hung parliament that allows CIA favourite and secular Shi'ite Iyad Allawi to form a governing coalition. That way, Sunnis might actually get crucial concessions on the Constitution. If not, they will likely return en masse to plan A, the insurgency. Sunnis turning out in force to vote, then may not be the great news the administration has been trumpeting it as. As Juan Cole rightly points out, the presence of democratic elections is no guarantee of peace, as Northern Island has proven time and again.

An informal exit poll by Reuters suggested that the the dominant Shi'ite Islamist bloc retained a strong following, with the United Iraqi Alliance itself claiming it would gain 57% of the vote. In some Southern Shiite areas it was expected to garner up to 90% approval. Its current partner, The Kurdish coalition, which won 25 percent of seats in January, retained overwhelming support in the northeastern Kurdish provinces over its Kurdish Islamist rival. Allawi, therefore, would have to make a strong showing in central cities if their ruling partnership was to be placed in a position of having to compromise.

Unfortunately, the preliminary results from Baghdad, where Allawi's party was hoping to gain around 38% of all voters, is not good. The electoral commission is reporting today that the United Iraqi Alliance is well ahead with 58 per cent of the vote in Iraq’s biggest electoral district. Allawi’s Iraqi National List is in a poor third place behind the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance party, a fierce opponent of the US presence in Iraq, and has less than a fourth of the UIA's votes.

Under the newly ratified constitution, the party with the biggest number of seats gets first crack at trying to form a government than can win parliament's endorsement. That is looking more and more likely to be the coalition of Shiite religious parties that dominate the outgoing government, which means more of the same kind of stuff as was going on before the election. Iraqi insurgents had already said that they would soon resume attacks on U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies, saying they had only observed an election truce to let fellow Sunni Arabs vote. A Shiite/Kurdish victory will mean Sunnis have little political leverage to effect change in the constitution, in discrimination or in heavy-handed Shiite tactics. They may well decide that a return to the insurgency in large numbers is their only hope for self-protection. That way, still, lies the very real threat of open civil war and balkanisation.