Iraq Creates History Again

Something truly historic happened in Iraq the other day. For the first time since the creation of Iraq as a state in 1921, a leadership that has emerged from free and fair elections was able to agree on a nominee for the post of prime minister.

But this is not the only reason why the occasion was historic. There is also the fact that Ibrahim Jaafari, the 58-year-old physician chosen for the job, is a Shiite Muslim.

To be sure Jaafari is not the first Shiite to get the job in Iraq. The current interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is also a Shiite. Between 1947 and the fall of the monarchy in 1958 four other Shiites, Saleh Jabr, Muhammad Sadr, Fadhil Jamali, and Abdul-Wahhab Marjan, also served as prime minister under the monarchy. The post-monarchy regimes produced three Shiite prime ministers, Naji Taleb, Saadoun Hammadi, and Muhammad-Hamzah Zubeidi.

But there are several points of difference between Jaafari and his predecessors. To start with he does not owe his job either to a king or to a despot but to a political alliance that collected more than four million votes throughout Iraq. Nor has he emerged from closed-door maneuvers orchestrated by the US-led coalition, as was the case with Allawi. Although the Shiites account for some 60 percent of Iraq’s population the total length of time in which they held the premiership amounted to no more than four years over a period of eight decades. Not surprisingly, almost all of Jaafari’s predecessors were known as “token Shiites”, brought under the limelight to help the Sunni-dominated regime negotiate a rough patch.

There is another, more important, difference between Jaafari and his predecessors as prime minister: They were all secular politicians.

Jaafari, however, is the leader of the main wing of the Al-Daawah (The Call) Party, Iraq’s oldest political-religious organization. A glance at Al-Daawah’s memorandum of association could have a chilling effect on any reader concerned about the use of religion as a political ideology. Some articles of that memorandum, especially with regard to the relationship between the mosque and the state, the status of women, and freedom of expression, are in contradiction with the democratic principles of the interim constitution under which Jaafari was elected. The picture becomes more disturbing when one reads the works of Al-Daawah’s founder, the late Ayatollah Muhammad-Baqer Sadr, who seems to have been more inspired by Enver Hoxa and Kim Il Sung than Islamic teachings.

One may wonder why the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite-led coalition that won 48 percent of the votes in last January’s elections, picked the most openly religious of its leaders as its nominee for the premiership. The alliance has many leaders of prime ministerial caliber, among them Hussein Shahrestani, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, and Ahmad Chalabi. And yet all three agreed to withdraw their candidacy in favor of Jaafari’s.

So, how concerned should supporters of democracy in Iraq be? Were those who claim that Iraq without a despot like Saddam Hussein is bound to fall into the hands of Khomeinist loonies right after all? Is Iraq to be transformed into a religious dictatorship under the Islamist slogan of: One man, one vote, once?

To be sure even the freest and fairest elections could produce dangerous results. After all, Hitler came to power through free elections. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see Jaafari’s nomination as the first major setback for Iraq’s nascent democracy.

The fact that Jaafari was chosen as a compromise candidate shows that the largely secular leadership of the United Iraqi Alliance did not see him as a threat to the process of democratization.

And the fact that Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of Shiite clerics, has not opposed the nomination is a sure sign that Jaafari has distanced himself from the most questionable positions of his party. Sistani refused persistent demands by the victorious alliance for him to pick the next prime minister. His message was clear: You are now answerable to your electorate, not to me!

Nevertheless, it is certain that Sistani, who regards the Khomeinist regime in Iran as an abomination, would not have remained so circumspect had there been any real danger of a drift toward Iranian-style mullahrchy in Iraq.

The first is that Jaafari’s presence at the head of a new interim government could deprive both Shiite and Sunni fundamentalists of their main claim that the new Iraqi leadership consists of a bunch of anti-religious personalities determined to reduce the role of Islam in Iraqi society. Jaafari’s designer stubble appeals to the more religious elements while his Jermyn Street suits are reassuring to the secular middle classes. Since the main task of the next interim government is to write a new permanent constitution and submit it to a referendum, it is important that the fundamentalists be deprived of their key arguments.

The second reason why Jaafari was chosen is his good standing among Arab Sunnis who stayed away from the elections in large numbers. Jaafari appeals to the more religious elements among the Sunnis, and this could help the new government to isolate the secularist Sunnis, mostly remnants of the Saddamite regime.

Jaafari also has the added advantage of having consistently opposed the policy of de-Baathification, so ardently advocated by his principal Shiite political rival Ahmad Chalabi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civil servants, businessmen, and military personnel, who had carried Baath Party membership cards to remain in the game or even to stay alive, regard Jaafari as the only Shiite leader capable of preventing a witch-hunt against them.

Jaafari’s choice should also be seen as a signal that the new Iraqi leadership wishes to reassure its Arab neighbors. Of the four candidates in the race for the premiership, Jaafari is the one that is regarded with the least suspicion by the Sunni-ruled Arab states. Chalabi is still subject to a politically motivated arrest warrant in Jordan, and remains persona non grata in some Gulf countries where he is attacked as an ally both of Iran and Israel at the same time. Sahrestani, who is possibly kept in reserve as a future prime minister in the post-interim period, is virtually unknown in the Arab world where personal contacts often matter more than formal state-to-state relations. Abdul-Mahdi, the fourth candidate in the race, is also an unknown quantity in the Arab countries. Anxious to retain his freedom of movement and thought, he spent his years of exile in France rather than in Iran or the Arab countries.

Jaafari’s rivals in the race for the premiership insist that fears about his supposedly “hidden agenda” are misplaced.

“The era of hidden agendas in Iraq is over,” says Adel Abdul-Mahdi. “We have entered a new chapter in our history in which power emanates from the will of the people as expressed through free elections. The world should give us a chance before rushing to judge us.”

The emerging democratic system in Iraq has no room for any one-man show. Jaafari will be one player among many in a system based on power sharing, coalition building, and compromise.

Jaafari’s Al-Daawah party collected some 11 percent of the votes in the municipal segment of last month’s election when each party went to battle under its own colors. That makes Al-Daawah, provided its two rival wings merge, the fourth largest party in the new Iraqi system, hardly a position from which to make a bid for exclusive power let alone attempting to impose a Khomeinist system on an unwilling people.

Time may well show that Jaafari, whether we like his political origins or not, may well have been the best choice in Iraq at this moment. In any case he was the choice of an elected leadership while his nomination still remains to be approved first by a three-person presidential council and then by the newly elected National Assembly. And once a Cabinet is formed the prime minister will be a team leader. Jaafari may have won the premiership while the Shiite-led alliance won the election. But what matters most is that Iraq has won a chance to build its democracy.

My sentiments exactly!
Time to be proud of what we've done and pray that it prospers in the face of much violent opposition from the totalitarians. A spirit has been awakened in Iraq and now let's pray it will be very difficult, nay, impossible, to get it back in the bottle.

That's the quote I focused on as well.

The same sceptics of the war, the same sceptics of the elections taking place, are the same skeptics insisting Iraq will adopt an Iranian Theocracy.

Why? Maybe they are hoping Iraq will follow suit so it counts as failure for Bush. Perhaps they are afraid of the unknown. Perhaps they are prejudiced against people of a different race and a different religion than they are accustomed.

My response is that in the past few years alone we've seen the power of Liberty. It's worth the risks, it shouldn't be subject to political calculation and importantly I recall no clause in the Bible stating peoples located in the Middle East were incapable of peaceful free governance because their religion was different than the majority in this country.

I'm hopeful. I'm heard not one reasonable argument for why I shouldn't be hopeful. Only resentment, fear and prejudice in its place. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they will protect the freedom they've newly experienced more than some in this country that seem to want to turn that freedom over to the will of the U.N.

I wonder how many naysayers have bothered to read the new Afghanistan Constitution adopted by on January 4,2004.

No it's not a photo copy of ours,and it shouldn't be,but it has some amazing likenesses in it's Articles.

All courtesy of those who serve to keep us free.

My response is that in the past few years alone we've seen the power of Liberty. It's worth the risks,

Oh, yes, we have. And it should be humbling for Americans who have had it so long we have no collective memory of why we wanted it so.
The Germans and Japanese have forgotten that we gave them the same chance, and maybe some day in the future, these countries will also forget. But that's a mark of success, in a way. Being secure in freedom is how everyone should live.

Yes, the Afghan constitution does have some resemblances to the U.S. constitution, but the U.S. constitution doesn't make Islam the official religion here.

The solar calendar they mention seems to start in the year 622 like the better-known Islamic lunar calendar...thus 2004 is 1382. It says the date 1298 is on the flag...that would correspond to 1919 or 1920 so it must have to do with the recognition of Afghanistan as a fully independent country shortly after World War I.

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