Iraq Election
Results Reflect
Broad Hostility To US Occupation
By Peter Symonds
17 February 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
official results of the Iraq election have exposed much of the hype
that emanated from the Bush administration and the media in the wake
of the poll.
Even through the
highly distorted prism of a vote held under US military occupation,
it is evident that the vast majority of Iraqis do not support the political
stooges installed by Washington in Baghdad. Far from being a vindication
of the US-led invasion, the outcome has confirmed that most Iraqis do
not believe that American soldiers are bringing peace and
democracy to the country.
According to official
figures, just over half the eligible voters58 percentcast
a ballot. In four predominantly Sunni provinces, the turnout was far
lower. In Anbar, to the west of Baghdad, where there has been fierce
and mounting armed resistance to the US invasion, just 2 percent of
voters went to the polls. Like other areas of the so-called Sunni Triangle,
it has borne the brunt of US military strikes. Tens of thousands have
been killed and maimed or arbitrarily detained and tortured.
In the three other
Sunni provinces, the higher turnout reflected the presence of significant
minorities. In the northern Nineveh province, the figure was 17 percent,
most of the voters being Shiites and Kurds. In Diyala, where about a
third of the population is Shiite, the turnout was 33 percent. In Salahaddin,
also with a substantial Shiite minority, it was 29 percent. The only
conclusion that can be drawn is that just a tiny fraction of the countrys
Sunnis, who make up about 20 percent of the countrys population,
took part in the election.
Such is the depth
of the resentment, hostility and anger at nearly two years of US attacks
that most Sunnis heeded the call of the Association of Muslim Scholars
(AMS) and various resistance groups not to vote. The AMS, an association
of around 3,000 Sunni clerics, issued a public statement denouncing
the election as illegitimate.
The main winners
in the election were the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA)a predominantly
Shiite coalitionand the Kurdistan Alliance (KA)comprising
the two major Kurdish bourgeois parties. The UIA received about 48 percent
of the vote and the KA some 26 percent. The number of seats each grouping
receives will only be finalised after any electoral challenges are settled.
It is estimated, however, that the UIA will get 140 seats in the 275-member
National Assembly and the KA will have 75 seats.
The UIA includes
the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the
Dawa Party, both of which are sectarian Shiite parties that seek to
establish some form of Islamic state. The other major coalition partner
is the Shia Political Council headed by Ahmed Chalabia longtime
US asset who fell out of favour with Washington last year.
While all three groups fully supported the US invasion, the UIA had
to distance itself from the occupation in the course of the campaign.
Such is the depth of anti-US hostility that the Shiite leaders appealed
to voters to support the UIA as the means of ending the American presence.
Not only did the
UIA have the public backing of Iraqs most senior Shiite clericAli
al-Sistanibut the tacit approval of rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
who gained a significant following during the Shiite uprising against
the US military last year. While he has been critical of the UIA for
not being sufficiently firm over a date for US withdrawal and personally
did not stand in the election, al-Sadr has not condemned this conservative
pro-US alliance. According to an analysis in Forbes magazine, 12 individuals
loosely connected to al-Sadr have been elected on the UIA list.
Significantly, the
UIA did not capture all the Shiite votes. The current US-installed prime
minister Iyad Allawi was able to make inroads into the UIA vote through
a campaign focussed on its sectarian policies and its Iranian connections.
Many Iraqi Shiites have a secular outlook and no desire to establish
a theocratic state along the lines of the Iranian regime. As a result,
whatever their misgivings about Allawi and the US occupation, a layer
of Shiite voters backed the prime minister and other secular parties.
Allawi won nearly 615,000 votesmore than half his totalin
Baghdad and the southern Shiite city of Basra.
In the north of
the country, Kurds turned out and voted overwhelmingly for the KA. Like
the Shiite majority, the Kurdish minority was led to believe that the
election would be a means of ending their long history of oppression.
KA leaders fostered the illusion that the US occupation would lead to
an autonomous or even fully independent Kurdish region that would end
persecution and poverty.
Electoral rout
The election results
have proven to be a devastating blow for those most openly identified
with the US-backed puppet regime in Baghdadabove all Allawi. Even
with the implicit backing of Washington and the heavily controlled media
in Iraq, his political groupingthe Iraqi listwas only able
to muster 14 percent of the vote and a probable 20 seats. Without his
aggressive campaign against the UIA, the figure would have been even
lower. Allawis vote indicates the real social base of support
for the US occupationless than 14 percent of those who voted,
or about 7 percent of Iraqis.
Iraqi president
Ghazi al-Yawar fared even worse. His partythe Iraqi Listgained
less than 2 percent of the vote and some five seats. Yawar is a prominent
figure among one of the main Sunni tribes. Another senior Sunni politician,
Adnan Pachachi, who has been paraded around the world by the US as a
representative of the Iraqi people, garnered just 12,728 votes and will
get no National Assembly seats. Yawar and Pachachi blame the Sunni boycott
for their poor result. In reality, the outcome reveals that these figures
have no credibility in the eyes of most Iraqis.
The lack of support
for the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) demonstrates that it has all but
lost its previous substantial base in the working class. The party consummated
a long history of opportunist manoeuvres and alliances, including at
one point with the Baathists, by backing the US invasion of Iraq and
then joining Washingtons puppet administration in Baghdad. Despite
an extensive election ticket, the ICP, which campaigned on secular nationalism,
not socialism, gained just 70,000 votes and two seats.
Following the announcement
of the election result, the wheeling and dealing to form the next government
has intensified. Under the framework put in place by the US occupation,
a two-thirds majority is necessary to choose the president and two vice-presidents,
who in turn select the prime minister. The cabinet chosen by the prime
minister then requires majority approval in the National Assembly. This
complex, indirect system strengthens the hand of smaller parties by
effectively handing them a means of vetoing the government.
While it gained
the largest vote and the most seats, the Shiite UIA will fall well short
of a two-thirds majority, forcing it to make a deal either with the
Kurdish leadership or with Allawi. A possible trade-off is being mooted
that would make Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) leader Jalal Talabani
president, in return for a UIA leader becoming the new prime minister.
Efforts are being made to include Sunni figures such as Pachachi or
Yawar to give the next government a more representative veneer.
All these petty
calculations ignore the deep divisions that exist between and within
the major groupings. Far from resolving the democratic and national
questions that were suppressed by the Baathist regime, the US occupation
has opened up and exacerbated longstanding sectarian and ethnic grievances
in the Iraqi ruling elites. The Kurdish leaderships demand for
autonomy is incompatible with the ambitions of the Shiite establishment
for hegemony in a united, centralised Iraq. The conflict is highlighted
by the bitter struggle among Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Turkomen groups
for control of the northern city of Kirkuk and its oil fields.
Moreover, the electoral
alliances were nothing more than temporary political marriages of convenience.
Within the Kurdish Alliance, the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party
are bitter rivals, which fought each other in the mid-1990s for dominance
of the countrys northern areas. Similarly, the UIA contains competing
factions of the Shiite elite. All of these inherent tensions will only
worsen as the national assembly and the next government confronts the
task of drawing up a new constitution.
The parties that
form the next government face a more fundamental dilemma. The real power
to make decisions will remain in Washington, not Baghdad. Even in formal
terms, the next government is severely constrained by the framework
put in place by the US occupation authority. The Bush administration
did not invade Iraq to improve the lot of the Iraqi people but to open
up the country, above all its oil, to US companies and to establish
a permanent US military presence.
As the new administration
colludes in implementing the US agenda, it will inevitably earn the
same contempt and hostility as its predecessor and confront growing
opposition and resistance.