Iraq and Afghanistan

The Iraq expert Juan Cole sums up the election results as follows:

United Iraqi Alliance 140 seats 51 percent
Kurdish Alliance 75 seats 27 percent
Iraqiya (Allawi) 40 seats 14.5 percent
Iraqiyyun (Ghazi al-Yawir) 5 seats 1.8 percent
Cadres and Chosen (Sadr) 3 seats 1 percent
Turkmen National Front 3 seats 1 percent
Islamic Action Council (Shiite) 2 seats 0.7 percent
Communists 2 seats 0.7 percent
Kurdish Islamic Bloc 2 seats 0.7 percent
National Democratic Alliance 1 seat 0.3 percent
Mesopotamian National (Christian) 1 seat 0.3 percent
Welfare and Liberation (Juburi) 1 seat 0.3 percent

A few comments on the list. The United Iraqi Alliance is the group put together by Ayatollah Sistani so that the Shiites could form a united front for the election. Its two main groups are the DAWA (itself divided) and SCIRI. The Iraqi National Congress of Chalabi was included and it may have won ten seats. The members of all these parties were forced largely into exile by Saddam. In the case of SCIRI, they went primarily to Iran and many of its supporters are thought to be, or accused of being, close to the Iranian government. Sistani appears to have wanted to be sure that expatriates did not dominate the result, so reduced the numbers placed near the top of election lists that were from these parties. The result is that even taken together they do not form a majority of the UIA's 140. Another note is that Muqtada al-Sadr played a very complicated role. One the one hand he opposed voting and some of his people still say the election was illegitimate; on another hand, he was given a major share in the UIA's winning list (15 or more); on the third hand, 3 seats went to "Cadres and Chosen", a Sadrist party that may or may not support Muqtada. Iraqiya is a secular party headed by the present PM, Allawi; Iraqiyyun is headed by the present President, Yawir. It is interesting to note that the secular vote was quite large. By and large we can include as secularists the Kurdish Alliance, Allawi's group, the Communists, the Christians, and Chalabi's faction within the UIA. There are surely others within the lists of the winners, particularly women. This means fifty percent or more of those elected (275) may well be secularists.

What Cole in his latest posting finds hard to understand is why Jaafari from the Dawa has not been acclaimed yet by the UIA as its consensus candidate for PM. Chalabi's candidacy still seems to have a chance and Cole finds this surprising. In fact, earlier on, Cole said that Chalabi had no chance. (Cole always downplays Chalabi and apparently hates him.) One reason he adduces for Jaafari's failure to win by acclamation is that by law 46 of the UIA seats had to be given to women and women are very suspicious of anything that sounds like what went on in Iran. Chalabi may be able to pick up as supporters many of the women, the Kurdish Islamic Bloc (Shiite) and, strangely, the seats won by Muqtada (strangely, because he is the most fundamentalist of the Shi'as).

With the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds lying in wait in the wings as the Shiites try to work out their candidate for Prime Minister, the end result, and even more what the end result portends, is far from clear.