Sharpening Iraq's Fault Lines

An apt headline, summarizing the results of the elections to Iraq's 275-representative-strong National Assembly on Jan. 30, would be: "No surprises, no upsets."

Given a large voter turnout in the Shiite majority areas and an even larger one in the Kurdistan region, it was widely predicted that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated alliances would top the polls. They did. As expected, due to the widespread Sunni boycott of the election, the only Sunni-dominated list that managed to win any seats garnered just five – one-eleventh of the seats that the Sunnis should have won.

Overall, the poll has exposed and sharpened the sectarian and ethnic fault lines in Iraqi society. At the same time, bolstered by a popular mandate, the new government seems set on a collision course with the American occupiers regarding the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.

Each of the three major communities has come to nurture a different scenario for the post-Saddam era. Shorn of their long-held power and yet not reconciled to powerlessness, Sunni leaders are still in disarray, focusing merely on expelling the Americans from their country. For minority Kurds, ethnically and linguistically set apart from Arabs, post-Saddam Iraq holds the promise of a sovereign state of Kurdistan with the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as its capital.

Driven by ethnic nationalism, the Kurds outdid the Shiites in their enthusiasm for balloting. The 90 percent-plus voter turnout in the three Kurdish-dominated provinces as well as in the ethnically-mixed provinces of Nineveh (capital, Mosul) and Tamim (capital, Kirkuk) has, not surprisingly, strengthened the bargaining power of the Kurdish leaders. Their Kurdistan Alliance gained 25 extra seats at the expense of Sunni Arabs. This has raised tensions between the two communities, especially in Kirkuk and Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city.

For the long-suppressed Shiite majority, the fall of Saddam's regime opened up for the first time the prospect of a popularly-elected, Shiite-led government in Iraq. Little wonder that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani declared that voting was a religious duty for believers. Accepting Sistani's fatwa (religious decree) unquestioningly, Shiite Muslims streamed to the polling centers on Jan. 30. By backing the Sistani-inspired United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), they underscored the UIA's 22-point manifesto, where the demand for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq" is almost at the top.

As it happens, this Shiite demand is also popular among Sunnis, from moderates to insurgents. It is up to the leaders of the better-organized Shiite community to find ways to end the alienation most Sunnis are feeling.

Once the National Assembly has elected a Presidency Council – a president and two deputies – it will elect an executive prime minister and a cabinet. A Shiite-majority government is mandated to demand immediate negotiations with the Bush administration on the modalities of the withdrawal of the American and other foreign troops from Iraq.

But it won't get far. "We will not set an artificial time table for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out," said President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 2. "We are in Iraq to achieve a result: a country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself." No prizes for guessing how long it will take to realize this over-ambitious set of Bush objectives.

So there is a strong prospect of a crisis in Baghdad soon after the inauguration of an elected government.

Besides administering Iraq, the new government will supervise the drafting of the permanent constitution by the National Assembly. Those charged with this task will face two major problems: defining the relationship between state and mosque and the degree of autonomy the Kurds are to receive (not to mention the boundaries of the region where it is to be exercised).