Backgrounder: Iraqi Election Results, Part 1

Some Things to Keep in Mind in Reading Analyses of the Iraqi Elections

The Iraqi provincial election results will not be official for quite some time and the early returns are still incomplete, but since everyone else is commenting on them, both newspapers and bloggers, I thought I'd express a few early thoughts. I'm not going to post a bunch of links here since anyone can Google the rather widespread coverage and it is a moving target anyway. I really hesitate to draw vast conclusions from early and incomplete returns, and I hate oversimplifications of complex issues, but even so, I'll both have to jump to a few conclusions and oversimplify a bit here. But let me make several points for now:

1) I do not hold myself out as an Iraq expert. So I should explain why I think I have standing to comment here. These explanations, caveats and justifications will also apply to later posts on Iraq and its elections. My only visit to the country was in 1989, and several things seem to have changed since then, as you may well have heard somewhere. On the other hand, in favor of my talking about Iraq: in my newsletter days I followed Iraq pretty closely, and I continue to follow both newspapers (including Iraqi newspaper coverage) and the wide range of Iraq-oriented bloggers from Juan Cole on the leftish side to military bloggers on the rightish side and some key Iraqi bloggers as well, though not daily, and not in enormous detail. (I'll review some of them in time. If you ever read Riverbend, I'm sure you miss her. Read her archive at the site and I think she has a book but can't find it on Google just now.) I've had the good fortune to know several former (and the occasional current) US Ambassador to Iraq; at least two of the Embassy Public Affairs Officers (perhaps more if I think hard about it) were good friends; just today I saw a former boss, David Mack, an old Iraq hand, and former Ambassador (and ex-head of Radio Free Iraq) David Newton to drop two names whose connections with MEI make it obvious; I've known three or four of the most prominent historians and political scientists (both US and British) dealing with modern Iraq as personal friends and have published many of the others, but won't drop names though I guess I just did. Also, because of my interest as a historian in the World War I and post WWI era, I'm probably more familiar than the blogger-in-the-street with the British experience in what they (charmingly) called "Mespot" (for Mesopotamia) back when they had their go at it. I also have a track record on military issues in Iraq and am right now trying to find a link to something I wrote in 2002 which, when I find it, I plan to post. I hope I have standing to comment on the place even if I have only spent about a week there. (And unlike most commentators, I'm glad to state my credentials, and lack thereof, up front.)

2) One headline that has been fairly frequent on both blogs and newspapers is a variant of a) parties supporting the central government have done well and/or b) the parties currently in power have done well. I am trying to think of a good, thoughtful, scholarly and dignified way to say "well, duh!," as my (third grader) daughter would put it, but right now I can't come up with a better comment. In Arab countries (and not just there by any means) the dawla, the folks in power, always do well, even in the most genuinely free and fair elections*, because they have control of the patronage. This is not a complicated concept. Anyone over 35 from Chicago should understand it. I'm not trying to be flip here, but one did not need a crystal ball to predict that the people already in office would do well. [Update: See Ambassador David Mack's note in the comments making the point that it's worth noting this time because the folks in power did not do well in 2005.] A side effect of this is probably going to be that centralization wins big and that those seeking an extremely loose federation (as suggested famously by now-US-VP Joe Biden and supported by most Kurds and some Iraqi Shi'ites) are going to be disappointed. The idea of a unitary Iraqi state is not as evanescent as some came to believe, but the results themselves don't seem surprising.

[*We always say "free and fair" elections. Can they be one but not the other? Maybe so, in fact I might be able to come up with examples each way, but I'd welcome comments for now if anyone is reading this yet.]

3) I've seen some articles suggesting the " Islamist" parties have lost a lot of power. I think this is a question of definition. Many of the commentators seem pleased that the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (ex-Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Muqtada al-Sadr's people seem to have lost at least some of their support. These are certainly Shi'ite Islamist movements, and what I suspect the commentators really have in the back of their minds is that they are pro-Iranian Shi'ite Islamist movements. The Supreme Council's front has also been pushing for an autonomous Shi'ite region on Kurdish lines, and thus runs counter to the general tilt towards centralization. The point I want to make for now is that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law List (there are alternate translations) is winning, and its two core member parties are the two branches of the Da'wa (Call) Party. Both wings of the Da'wa began as, and remain, Islamist in orientation and ideology (the "Call" of their name refers to proselytization to Islam), though less fully committed to the Iranian political formula than the two previously mentioned. Some of the American commentators I think, when they say that the Islamists lost ground, mean Iran's Islamists lost ground, while the US' Islamists did just fine, thank you. And in some provinces the Shi'ites are losing ground to Sunni groups because this time the Sunnis are actually voting, and some of those Sunni groups are Islamist as well. I think some of these analyses are more influenced by an "Islamist=Iran" equation than a real look at the parties' platforms.

4) Somewhere I saw, or perhaps heard on the radio (sorry, can't find it right now, but I'm not setting up a straw man here: I did hear or read it somewhere), someone saying that the Kurds had done more poorly than in the past. That may well feed into the accepted meme that centralization is winning. But please, folks, consider the context. These provincial elections only took place in 14 of the 18 provinces of Iraq. They did not occur in Dahuk, Irbil, and Suleimaniyya provinces, which constitute the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), nor were they held in the province Saddam Hussein renamed Ta'mim (Nationalization) Province but which most people (and as near as I can tell all Kurds) still call Kirkuk. These are the four provinces with the most Kurdish population, and weren't in play. There are Kurds in some other provinces, most notably Ninawa (Nineveh), Diyala, and of course Baghdad. As far as I can tell, all the "Kurds did poorly" reports relate to Ninawa. Now I may be wrong here: the early numbers are very incomplete. But Ninawa is the province around Mosul (and used to just be called Mosul province, until Saddam started naming things after ancient Mesopotamian sites), and in the previous provincial elections in 2005, the Sunni population mostly boycotted. This time around there were several Sunni Arab parties contending, including one specific to Ninawa called al-Hadba after a famous minaret there, and so naturally the Sunni Arabs (most Kurds are Sunni too, so the real division is ethnic) increased their share vis-a-vis the Kurds. But this may be specific to Ninawa/Mosul. And most of Iraq's Kurds weren't even voting this time, and the real hotbed of Arab-Turkmen-Kurdish conflict, Kirkuk, wasn't either.

5) As near as I can tell no one can really read the tea leaves in Baghdad yet. Perhaps I've missed it. But please keep in mind that the city of Baghdad is about 6.5 million and the Governorate (province) somewhat bigger, and that Iraq's overall population in the last census was something like 29 million. The capital province is a fifth or more of the country. The results will matter. Just as American election reportage always starts with (I think its name is) Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, where the whole town of a dozen or so vote at midnight, so analysts of the Iraqi vote are using what numbers they have so far. But unless Baghdad's numbers are in, we aren't there yet. I'll write more when we are.

That's about it for now. I'll continue to comment as we learn more, and if any true Iraq experts are reading this go right ahead and comment, please. We're slowly letting the world know that this blog exists.