04/23/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, so Jason Ditz is the Managing News Editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find all of his news summaries and analysis at news.antiwar.com.
And he's been keeping close watch on the Iraqi elections.
Oh, by the way, I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Jason, how's it going?
Good.
Good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I appreciate you joining us.
So, talk to me about Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq.
What's going on?
Well, actually, no.
First, talk to me about at least 61 dead in bombings across Baghdad and who knows where else this morning.
Yeah, there's been quite a bit of violence today.
I mean, there seems to be violence pretty much every few days now in Iraq.
Pretty major bombings.
Over the past four months, they've said month over month, every month has been worse than the previous year.
Well, Dar Jamal was on the show a few weeks back, and he was saying, you know, nobody reports on it anymore, but there's still...
Well, some people report on it, but it doesn't get much attention on TV anyway.
But there's still bombings on a regular basis there.
But it does seem like an uptick here.
Who's fighting who?
Do you know?
Who's bombing who?
It seems to be the same old story of the Sunnis and the Shiites.
A Shiite neighborhood will get bombed and then a Sunni neighborhood will get attacked.
And mostly it's been the Sunnis lately, but it doesn't seem to be exclusively them anymore.
Yeah.
Well, you know, let me just read through real quick here.
I'll try not to go too far with this, but this is from the CNN story this morning.
Two car bombs targeted worshippers in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, killing 39 and wounding 56.
Eight people died and 23 were wounded when a car bomb and a roadside bomb detonated outside Mushsin al-Hakim Mosque in southeastern Baghdad.
In the northwestern Baghdad neighborhood of Huriyah, a car bomb explosion outside Hadi al-Chalabi Mosque killed five people and wounded 10.
A roadside bomb explosion outside this green mosque in some neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad killed two people and wounded seven.
One person was killed and six were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in an outdoor market in the southern Baghdad district of Dora.
And so anyway, if you think back to when, you know, I guess two years ago, three years ago, during the worst of the Civil War, as far as it was being portrayed to the American people on TV, it was about this bad, right?
I mean, this is pretty bad.
Yeah, this would have been a normal day then, and we're not quite to where this is a completely normal day anymore.
But it's getting closer and closer to that.
All right.
So now talk to me about Nouri al-Maliki and what these people are fighting about, because it isn't about I want you to convert to my sect.
Right.
It's a dispute about the election, which is now a month and a half ago.
And we still don't have any real effort to form a government by any of the parties.
And we're not even really clear who won because the election commission has announced that they're recounting all the ballots in Baghdad, which is something that Maliki has wanted since the election because this party didn't do as well in Baghdad as they thought.
But since the election commission is so close with Maliki, there's kind of an assumption that these recounts are going to be designed to ensure that he gets a few extra seats.
Yeah.
Like Al Gore saying, just recount these four counties for me, please.
Right.
Well, not that Bush didn't steal it.
Both sides were trying to steal that one.
And in this case, you have.
Well, I guess give us the lowdown on the three major blocks and the compromises that are not being worked out.
I mean, it's a parliamentary system.
They need a majority and their one big house of representatives to choose their prime minister.
Right.
No one of these parties is going to get anywhere near a majority.
Right now, the preliminary count showed Arakiya, which is Ayatollah Ali's block, which is sort of a secular block and has a large number of Sunnis in it, leading with 91 seats.
Maliki is just behind with 89 seats.
And then the third place finisher, which is kind of a kingmaker, is Muqtada al-Sadr's Iraqi National Alliance, which has 70 seats.
Right.
And it's important, I think, when you call it Muqtada al-Sadr's Iraqi National Alliance, as you discussed on, explained to us on the show the last time you were here, it's really no longer the Hakeem's Iraqi National Alliance.
The elder Hakeem Abdulaziz al-Hakeem has died.
His son has taken over.
And apparently Sadr has really muscled into control over that entire group.
The younger Hakeem never appeared all that interested in politics.
And to the extent he tried, he isn't all that savvy either.
So the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council barely got any seats at all in the election.
Are they going to stay in the coalition with Sadr?
Or is there a chance they might split off and go join with Maliki's new party?
Well, there's been some talk that they might do that.
But Hakeem has also spoken favorably about Alawi being the winner of the election, and that Alawi should be allowed to form the government.
So I'm not really sure that they've made any decision to change.
Well, is this about the Iranians wanted a coalition?
It seemed like, well, at least the way the headlines read, and I don't think I ever got a chance to get into this one or not, it seemed to be saying the Iranians are calling for Alawi to be allowed to win, that the coalition ought to favor the former insurgency, the people who lost the civil war.
Is that right?
Well, the Iranians initially called for a Shiite-dominated government.
They wanted Maliki and Sadr to form an alliance and kind of cut the Sunnis out entirely, which they probably could have done, but it probably would also lead to major civil war again in Iraq, which it looks like we might get anyway.
And after Alawi pressing Iran and sending delegations to Iran, they've sort of backed off of that.
Now they're saying, well, it should be an all-inclusive government.
But during the run-up to the election, Iranian state media pretty regularly had on guests that were accusing Alawi and his bloc of being the new Baathists and being in America's pocket, and America wanted to install Iraqia's number two man Saleh al-Mutlaq as the new Saddam and use Iraq as a staging ground for invading Iran.
That was a fairly regular story in Iranian media, and now all of a sudden they're saying Iraqia's not so bad and they should probably be allowed to be in the government.
Well, boy, what a complicated mess.
I mean, hell, if you and I are having as much trouble as we're having keeping track of it all, I can't imagine what it's like to be driving a truck down the highway in Austin listening to this and having suffered through seven years of American quality news coverage on television and not knowing who the hell any of these people are or what any of this means.
It's like we're talking about sports stars from some team nobody ever heard of or something here.
How do you get across to people?
Tell us about Muqtada al-Sadr.
I mean, he's living in Tehran now, but he was always, I thought, voted most likely to form a coalition with the former Baathists as long as they could agree on kicking us the hell out of the country.
That's always been his big issue, kicking the U.S. out, but he's also made a lot of enemies among the Sunnis with his old militia, the Mahdi Army.
Sure.
I mean, I guess the coalition with the Sunni days was before the worst of the Civil War.
Right.
And that's kind of a problem all three ways, because all three of these guys have made enemies of one another over the past few years, and none of them really seems inclined to join with any of the others.
Now, Muqtada al-Sadr is the son-in-law of two very high-ranking Shiite clerics that Saddam Hussein killed, and he's just the inheritor of their legitimacy.
And he's just, as best I can tell, he's the de facto leader of all poor and working-class, regular, Joe Shia Arabs in Iraq, right?
Right.
He's incredibly popular with a certain, fairly large percentage of the Iraqi population.
I mean, he's never been a politician.
He's more of a religious leader, and he's not even in Ayatollah, but he's got just enormous sway in Sadr City, and in Basra, and all over the Shiite part of the country.
Yeah, he snaps his fingers, and he has a Mahdi Army.
Right.
He could absolutely form another one, probably in a matter of days, if he wanted to.
And for another thing, just look at the referendum that his bloc held after they came in third place.
He decided they need a referendum, because they're not really sure who to ally with, so they want to organize a referendum to decide who's the next prime minister.
The Iraqi election took five months of bickering in parliament, and six months to organize.
He had a referendum organized in a couple of days, and had a vote count out in a couple of more days.
Yeah, I mean, the fact that they picked Jafari, who was the original compromise candidate after the elections of 2005, and who was then basically pushed out by Condoleezza Rice and replaced with Maliki, but is a member of the same Dawah party there, is almost beside the point.
It's like you're saying, sounds like you're saying, the most important lesson of that is that, wow, this guy can hold an election in a day and a half!
All he has to do is ask for one, and it's done!
Yeah, he can definitely get things done.
Sort of the bizarre thing is the result of the election.
I mean, as you mentioned, Jafari winning, but two of the top vote-getters were members of his own political faction.
He went out of his way to exclude from the ballot, because he wanted to get an idea of who he should be allying with, and I think the lesson there is, a lot of his followers don't want him allying with anybody.
So what about the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran?
Has he got the ability to just say, look, bring me Sadr, bring me somebody from Dawah, let's have a big meeting and I'll decide this?
I really doubt it at this point.
I mean, there's a lot of anger, there were reports that Maliki had an arrest warrant for Sadr issued a couple of days before the election, and they'd never liked each other before that, so I sort of doubt that any external force, no matter how influential, could just solve this for them.
What about the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani?
Haven't heard from him in a while.
Well, he might be in a better position to do it, but he's always said that he doesn't want to interfere in politics.
That's always been his position, that the clerics should kind of be separate from the political process.
So I don't really think he's likely to suddenly change course and try to settle this election.
Well, the last few years, anyway, he was the guy, after all, who vetoed Paul Bremer's plan for the government there and demanded one man, one vote, and got them the constitution they have now, and the power factions they have now.
But, I mean, I guess if you leave personalities aside, it seems like the most natural alliance would be the Sadr-dominated Iraqi National Alliance and Maliki's Iraqi party.
Or, yeah, I guess I could see, you know, if some hard feelings could be put aside, Sadr allying with Alawi's people.
I don't guess I see any incentive Alawi and Maliki have to work together.
I don't know.
What a damn mess.
So, are there any signs of any different team making progress here at all, or this is just a stalemate for now and we'll just shrug our shoulders and wait and see?
Well, Maliki's state of law bloc claimed to have already come to a deal with the Iraqi National Alliance about a week and a half ago.
They said the deal was done, they're just negotiating on how they're going to decide who the next prime minister is going to be.
But they said that a couple of times over the course of a 24-hour period, and they haven't said anything else since then, and the Iraqi National Alliance has never said a word about it one way or another, so I don't know if that was true at all.
But that's really the only indication in a few weeks that anything's been done at all.
Yeah, it seemed like a pretty clumsy play on Maliki's part, as far as I could tell.
Like it was going to somehow put Sauter in a corner and make him choose him or something, I don't know.
But yeah, I was waiting with bated breath to see what was going to happen there, and then nothing happened.
Well, I don't know.
I guess just my best of luck to the Iraqi people.
I sure hope it doesn't go back to war there.
This is what happens when you turn a society upside down, y'all.
Long-term consequences, cause and effect, and stuff like that.
Thanks very much for your coverage as always, Jason.
I appreciate it, and I'm sure I'll have you back as things develop.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, y'all, that's Jason Ditz from www.antiwar.comnews.antiwar.com, and man, I wish I had a lot more time, because there's been a whole bunch of developments on Iran news.
Fight back while you still can.
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