Analytical Assumptions for Iraq; Part 1

I write about Iraq a lot. Over the past three years, the majority of the words that I have published have concerned themselves with one aspect of Iraq or another. I am also writing for an overwhelmingly new audience here, so I want to make my assumptions clear as to how my analytical framework/mental model is currently constructed. This model has gone through a couple of revisions due to either change on the ground or more often due to my removing bad assumptions and presumptions and replacing them with something else. I believe that a good mental model needs its assumptions to be explicit and clear so that they can be challenged both by myself and by my readers.

Everything that I write in this piece will be at a large scale. I'll start out at the political groupings, and in future posts move over to political and economic aspirations and finally discuss military capabilities. These three threads are tightly interwoven. If we wanted to do we can get down to the level of the Peoples Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, and I imagine that in the future I will get down that far into the weeds, but right now an overview should be more than enough.

As I see it, there are six direct veto-playing groups in Iraq and several groups that have indirect or partial vetoes. By veto players, I mean groups have sufficient political and military power to deny several distinct groups there their maximal goals. At the same time the veto player is unable to achieve their maximal goals either. Maximal goals cannot be achieved except by having all six groups either agreeing towards those goals or by that particular goal having absolutely no salience to one of the veto-players. The two partial veto players can create conditions that make the use of the veto by a veto player significantly easier or more difficult, and they can also significantly slow down the achievement of a goal. So who are these veto players? Let's break them down a couple of different ways.

First we'll look at them by sectarian/ethnic divide, and then by their stands on the degree of desired centralization and how they view the optimal relationship with Iran.

Team Shia:

· SCIRI/Badr Brigades --- This group is primarily composed of pro-Iranian, and middle class Shia groups. The Badr Brigades, the military wing of SCIRI, were trained by Iran starting during the Iran-Iraq War, and fought for Iran in that war. Badr was kept out of Iraq until after the invasion. Since then they have been able to grab several key levers of power, most importantly the Interior Ministry. They are anti-anti-occupation and their power base is in the Shia south and not Baghdad or Basra. Ayatollah Sistani of the Najaf clerical establishment has a good deal of influence with this group.

· DAWA --- Another middle class Shia Party, currently one of its members is Prime Minister Maliki, and the interim Prime Minister Jaafari during the transitional government. Their origin is as a religious, anti-communist, anti-Ba'athist party that got exiled during the 70s by the Ba'ath regime. They don't have as much explicit military capacity as SCIRI but they have substituted the US military as part of their own militia. Ayatollah Sistani of the Najaf clerical establishment has a good deal of influence with this group.

· Sadrist factions --- There are a couple of major Sadrist groups in play, the biggest and best known is the faction led by Moqutada Sadr. They all share several common attributes. The two most important attributes are their leadership cadres are composed of individuals who were in Iraq pre-invasion and had been there for decades AND the vast majority of the Sadrist supporters are poor urban Shiites. The Moqutada Sadr group has its home base in the vast Sadr City section of Baghdad where about 10% of the entire country's population lives, and it also has significant strength in Maysan Province. They are Iraqi nationalists and anti-occupation as this is the group led by its armed wing, the Mahdi Army/Jaish al Mahdi [JAM], which conducted two major anti-American offensives in 2004. The only other Sadrist group of note that we may occasionally need to pay attention to Fadillah whose power base is in Basra and has come into conflict with the main Sadrist group. Ayatollah Sistani of the Najaf clerical establishment has moderate at best influence with these groups.

Iraqi Exiles --- they are a partial veto player --- not a whole lot of influence, they are attached to the hip of the US military and do not have a coherent internal bloc of support. Their power resides in their ability to play to the US neo-cons and say to this group of US policy makers the right things. Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi are the names you'll see most prominently connected to this group

Team Sunni:

Iraqi Sunni Arabs in general with a variety of motivations [ex-Baathists, nationalists, local defense groups] that overlap, are vehemently anti-occupation and against the current Baghdad government. This opposition is fairly uniform across the Sunni Arab public opinion universe although the degree of participation in the insurgency varies greatly by individual, clan and city.

· Al-Quaeda in Iraq/Shura Council --- partial veto player --- they are not able to stop maximal demands of any group, and according to recent news reports they are on the outs with a significant segment of the Iraqi Sunni Arab population, but we have seen these reports on a regular basis for the past three years. The Sunni Arabs have seen this group as useful cannon fodder but a political problem at times.

Team Kurd: Two major parties in the Kurdish areas of Iraq but they can, at this level of analysis, be treated as a single group. They both want either a completely autonomous and economically self-sufficient Kurdistan or a de jure independent Kurdistan instead of the 98% de facto independent Kurdistan that they currently have. Both parties are pro-American/occupation. They are pro-American as they need a serious protector against Iran and Turkey, and pro-occupation as it keeps the rest of Iraq from hammering them and the occupation in Kurdistan is almost non-existent.

Team USA/UK: At the National Command Authority level a/k/a President Bush, the USG/US DOD is pro-occupation, and pro-Baghdad central government, which means we are a de facto an ally of Team Shia and Team Kurd and an enemy of Team Sunni.

So this look is fairly monolithic, but lets throw in a couple of other cross cutting issues: The first is the question of how much power does the Baghdad central government have and more importantly how does oil get taxed and thus distributed and to whom.

Team Sunni and the Sadrists factions want a strong central government that can distribute funding as it sees fit. They desire a strong system of central government control over the oil industry. This is because these two groups live atop of very little current or probable future oil production. In US terms they want a government that has been empowered to the same degree as the 1787 Constitution empowered the central government.

The Kurds, DAWA and SCIRI want a very weak central government and very strong provincial or provincial federation government. The majority of their supporters live in the oil producing regions. Again in US terms, they want a government similar to the Articles of Confederation government.

The US Government varies its opinions and policies on what type of Iraqi government it wants to support. They need a strong central government to tamp down on the violence by having a strong Iraqi military but the USG's primary allies do not want one.

The exiles are irrelevant. I think that they want a strong autocratic central government as long as they are at the top in order to self-enrich themselves and their buddies, but they are irrelevant to this calculation.

Now lets look at how the different parties view relationships with Iran:

· SCIRI-Badr's leadership have a 20+ year relationship of being Iranian funded, trained and protected, they want a very close relationship with Iran

· DAWA wants a pretty close relationship with Iran

· Sadrists are nationalists and dislike Iran, although necessity is forcing some Sadrist splinter groups to seek Iranian aid.

· Sunni Arabs hate Iran with a bloody passion

· Kurds are scared of Iran, as they have been engaged in several border skirmishes in the past two generations

· Shura Council/Al-Quaeda in Iraq hates Iran for a variety of religious and strategic reasons.

· US Government wants very low Iraq-Iran cooperation for a variety of strategic and domestic political reasons.

To reduce the complexity, we can use the following matrix to sort out which groups want what and who the apparent allies may be:




I am assuming a lot of cross cutting issues that are all potentially veto-able points. There are no issues on which the six veto players can agree upon and thus conflict either politically or militarily is almost inevitable. And since the political process has been reduced to sectarian nose counting, conflict is guaranteed.