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Old Thursday, June 08, 2006
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Default Future of Iraq Govt.

IRAQ’S GOVERNMENT

COULD IT PREVAIL?


Dubai
A new government has only a few months in which to stop the killing
( The Economist )



After six months of wrangling, a national-unity government that embraces genuine representatives of all Iraq’s main religious and ethnic groups has emerged under a new prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. The American administration insists that the event marks a hopeful turning point. After a visit to Baghdad this week, Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is likewise said to be convinced that there is at last a real hope that the government may impose itself. All the same, its chances of stemming the insurgency and bringing the minimal stability to allow for the withdrawal of American troops and their allies still look only middling at best.


As he unveiled his team, Mr. Maliki sounded doggedly upbeat, insisting that Iraqis would now more rapidly take over full responsibility for the country’s security. In the next two months, the British would hand over two of the fur provinces they control in the south. Except for Baghdad and the out of-control western province of Anbar, where the Sunni insurgency is fiercest, Iraqi forces should- he said- handle security in the rest of the Iraq’s 18 provinces by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Iraq’s fledging forces would hit the rebels with “maximum force”.


In truth, no one knows whether the new government will manage to impose itself any better than the previous one, under Mr. Maliki’s ineffectual predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaffari. The best guess in Baghdad is that Mr. Maliki has less than a year, perhaps only six months, in which to reverse the tide of sectarian carnage and chaos that now grips nearly all the Sunni Arab pats of the country, especially cities with mixed populations, such as Baghdad, Mosul and those in between, along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.


As in the previous government, the main Shia block, the Islamist-minded United Iraqi-Alliance, has the lion’s share of top jobs, including the prime ministry. But, to acknowledge the high Sunni Arab turnout in last December’s general election, Mr. Maliki has brought all parliament’s main groups into his government, including the largest Sunni Arab one, a clutch of Islamist-oriented parties known as the Iraqi Consensus Front, which broadly sympathises with the insurgents. Still, the fact that Mr. Maliki has been unable, asyet, to fill the crucial ministries of defence and interior (now in temporary hands) bodes ill for the new government’s hoped-for unity.


Atleast, as a sop to the disenchanted Sunni Arabs, he has sidelined the previous interior minister, Bayan al-Jabr, a Shia who was widely accused of winking at sectarian murders committed against Sunnis by militias acting under cover of his ministry.


In ay event, the government is a sectarian carve-up, with most groups still likely to view the ministries they have been allocated as vehicles for patronage. The main Shia alliance retains the oil ministry, though it has been reassigned to a respected scientist, Hussein al-Shahristani, in the hope that he will put national interests above those of his Shia co-religionists.


The Shia’s dominant alliance will also control most of the “service ministries”, such as health, education and transport, promoting itself as ordinary Iraqi’s chief benefactor. On this score, a radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who has the largest number of followers in parliament’s Shia alliance, has gained ground.


The Kurd’s have continued to do well. As well as holding the national presidency, they will keep the foreign ministry. More to the point, as Shia and Sunni Arabs argue bitterly over the shape of Iraq and who should run it, the Kurds are steadily entrenching their autonomy in the north and may soon succeed in formally incorporating most of the disputed oil-rich Kirkuk province into their domain.


As a pre-requisite for drawing more Sunni Arabs into peaceful politics, Mr. Maliki knows he must fast set about tweaking last year’s new constitution to ensure a fair distribution of oil-revenue to oil-deprived Sunni provinces and to reassure Sunnis that decentralization will not mean leaving them in a fly-blown Iraqi rump state.


The real question is whether new ministers hailing from the Sunni’s Consensus Front (perhaps including the defence minister ) will persuade many insurgents to lay down their arms. So far, the omens remain poor, though informal contacts are said to have been sporadically opened. For one thing, the insurgency is highly fractured, though some American and Iraqi commanders believe there is scope for deals with local guerrilla leaders and tribal sheikhs that might lead to wider ceasefires. For another, it is clear that, while some of the more nationalist-minded rebel groups may be prepared to give Sunni ministers in the government at least a chance to parley, those who draw inspiration from al-Qaeeda or follow its self-proclaimed leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, certainly are not. Worst of all, the sectarian titfor-tat may already be so out of control that no ministers in the new government, whether Shia or Sunni, have a chance of holding back the militias that have become a law unto themselves.


In the previous government, Shia ministers argued that militias had a legitimate role in keeping order alongside of the security forces. Mr. Maliki, however, in a hopeful change of tack, says that all weapons must be in the hands of the state. He has also discussed integrating militias into the armed forces – a suggestion hitherto rejected by Sunni Arabs- or unifying the country’s myriad security agencies into a single force. However, as the ethnic cleansing and communal bloodletting proceed and people still look to the militias as their last line of protection, such worthy ideas are unlikely to be heeded soon.


We’ll stand alone

Mr. Maliki’s hopes of a rapid withdrawl of American and allied foreign troops also look unlikely to be fulfilled as early as he wants. A retired American general Barry McCaffery, recently argued that, while Mr. Maliki’s failure might bring the country to full-blown civil war in a matter of months, the new Iraqi army needed strong combat backup from the Americans for atleast another two, and may be as many as five years, before it could stand on its own feet.


So why the optimism ? The highest hope, for Mr. Maliki and his team, is that, as the Iraqi forces begin to assert themselves against the insurgents, a stand-off may slowly ensue, allowing Sunnis and Shias in government to reach out to the more amenable of the rebels. Mr. Maliki’s mammoth task would then be to persuade the Sunni minority to accept a humbler role in a decentralized state and to urge the Shia majority genuinely to share power with its former Sunni oppressors as the price of containing the rebels.




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