The Arrest of Ali Faysal al-Lami

There are problems concerning the portrayal in some media sources of Ali al-Lami – the de-Baathification director captured recently by US forces on suspicion of pro-Iranian activities – as a straightforward “Sadrist”. Lami, whose name suggests a link with the Bani Lam tribe of Maysan in the far south, has a long history of association with Ahmad Chalabi and Abd al-Karim al-Muhammadawi who back in 2005 participated in a party called the “Shiite council” – one of the first Iraqi parties to use Shiite sectarian identity in such an explicit way in its name. Jawad al-Bulani, the current ministry of interior, at one point also belonged to this circle.

There are many other individuals in the United Iraqi Alliance who since 2005 have floated between several camps – they include figures like Sami al-Askari and Jabir Habib Jabir. It seems inconceivable that Lami should have been able to hold on to his current position for so long time unless the Maliki regime saw certain advantages in having him there.

In Denver, No “Plan for Iraq” Yet

In a positive development, Senator Joe Biden yesterday refrained from any mention of his previous “plans for Iraq” which include a soft partition scheme and a more recent (and more general) plan for “active federalization”. Instead he referred more generally to Barack Obama’s position on the war in Iraq.

What remains for the Democratic Party is to define an exit strategy that does not convert the Iraq situation into a net gain for Iran. As long as the final phase of the US occupation of Iraq involves consolidation of the Maliki regime and the basic system of government adopted in 2005 (rather than a weakening of these two factors) such gains for Iran will be the inevitable outcome. What is missing in Democratic discussion of exit strategies is the realisation that US policies in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 (and specifically Washington’s particular choice of partners among the Shiites) have unintentionally strengthened Iran’s position in Iraq quite considerably, so that leaving Iraq tomorrow would not in any sense mean a return to the status quo ante of 10 April 2003. This point may perhaps seem a little long-winded for an election campaign where there will be a preference for black and white caricatures, but for those who truly care about the political stability of the Gulf region in the long term it should be seen as the fundamental issue.

Change the Iraqis Can Believe In? Why Obama–Biden Could Mean More of the Same (Or Maybe Something Worse)

In many ways, Barack Obama’s approach to Iraq is strikingly similar to that of the Bush administration and John McCain. In theory, the addition of Joe Biden to Obama’s ticket could change this, but over the last weeks and months there have been interesting moves by Biden to remove most traces of his “Iraq plans” from the public domain.

With regard to Iraq, the real context of the upcoming Democratic convention is that “the surge” in Iraq is not working at all. Despite measurable successes in bringing the levels of violence down, the American-sponsored political system in Iraq is actually more dysfunctional than ever, and incapable of delivering the results that both Iraqis and Americans are looking for. Perhaps the best evidence is the fact that it is now Washington’s own darlings in Iraq and their pet projects that stand in the way of progress, as seen in the vice-presidential vetoes this year against the provincial powers law and the provincial elections law. There is in fact a cross-sectarian majority in the Iraqi parliament that wants to have early elections and power-sharing in Kirkuk, but Washington’s allies among the Kurds and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) keep blocking progress towards national reconciliation and a more sustainable political system. The salient cleavages in Iraqi politics are increasingly of a non-sectarian nature – the alliance that challenged the Maliki government through its demand for early elections and power-sharing in Kirkuk had an eminently cross-sectarian composition, and no matter how the media likes to spin it, the recent sacking of the police commander in Diyala did pit some powerful Shiite players against each other – but American policy fails to respond to this reality.

Thankfully, there is growing attention to these cross-sectarian trends at least among some US analysts. There has been some debate as to the usefulness or otherwise of a new nomenclature introduced by USIP’s Sam Parker that employs the terms “The Powers That Be” and “The Powers That Aren’t” to describe the real battlefronts in Iraqi politics, with some critics finding the dichotomy pretentious and nothing more than a new name for “government and opposition”. However, that overlooks the way in which Parker’s concepts clearly augment our understanding of Iraq: they define the glue that holds the government together, and provide a very good point of departure for discussing those ideological pressures that threaten the survival of Maliki and which should be taken into account in any serious discussion of future US policy.(1)

Barack Obama, though, has yet to discover the usefulness of these concepts. During his recent trip to the Middle East, he revealed an extremely dated way of thinking about Iraq, more or less reiterating the Iraq cosmology of those Bush administration officials that have been in charge since 2003. During a press conference in Amman on 22 July following a visit to Anbar where meetings with “Sunni tribal leaders” were high on the agenda, this tendency could be seen very clearly, with Obama consistently portraying the principal dynamic of Iraqi politics as a struggle between Shiites and Sunnis. For example, Obama opined: “I think resolving the big issues like the hydrocarbons law in a way that gives Sunnis the impression that their voice is heard, that’s going to be important.” In fact, the real problem with regard to the hydrocarbons law is that two Kurdish parties insist on the right of federal regions to sign contracts with foreign companies, whereas almost all the other parties – in this case Sunnis and Shiites alike, and including some of those Shiites that normally are quite pro-Kurdish – favour a more centralised system. Most Iraqis are confident that a purely demographic distribution system based on governorates (not sects!) will be adopted, and see the American quest for a “Sunni quota” as out of touch with Iraqi traditions of centralised government. Again, Obama: “Now, the willingness of Sunni cabinet members who have resigned to now return, to have those cabinet seats filled, and a sense that the Sunnis are going to participate aggressively in the upcoming elections, that, again, is I think a sign of progress.” Once more, very few analysts that have done work on Iraq before 2003 think the return to the government of the tiny Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) would be of any consequence whatsoever. With or without the IIP in their ranks, Maliki and his team will still fail to bring significant change to Iraq and a less sectarian political system of the kind that a majority of parliamentarians are calling for.

Arguably, the addition of Joe Biden to the Obama ticket might aggravate these tendencies, because in the past Biden has been a leading American voice in promoting an interpretation of Iraq as a country of three mutually hostile and internally stable population blocks. His various “plans for Iraq”, while frequently misunderstood, in different ways reinforce the view that the main problem in Iraq has to do with a centralised state structure and coexistence issues. Like many others in American politics, Biden has failed to acknowledge the emerging non-sectarian trends in Iraq, seeking instead to push ideas about “Sunni federalism” during his visit to the Anbar governorate. Remarkably, however, it seems that Biden may have cleaned up his Iraq rhetoric as part of his VP bid. At least, it is quite conspicuous how every trace of his “plan for Iraq” now appears to have been erased from his website at joebiden.com, where he now instead supports Barrack Obama’s more general argument about shifting the focus to Afghanistan. Also, at some point between April 2008 and today, Biden’s website specifically devoted to his soft partition schemes, http://www.planforiraq.com, was quietly shut down – at this site, Biden’s rhetoric had consistently focused on a tripartite Iraq to the very end. Only on his Senate website traces of his Iraq policy remain, but even there a more toned-down version appears, with the emphasis on a general push for federalisation. This is still in contravention of the Iraqi constitution (which specifically rejects any kind of elite-driven federalisation process) but it could perhaps mean that Biden increasingly realises that his plans were unsustainable and that trends in Iraq militate against them.

Still, for Iraq this seems to be a stark choice. On the one hand, there is McCain, who looks set to persevere with the Bush policy of handling Iraq primarily through military power instead of working for a more truly inclusive political system. With its systematic promotion to top positions in the new Iraq of some of the most sectarian, pro-Iranian and unprofessional cliques among Iraq’s 18 million (and mostly Iraqi nationalist) Shiites, this contradictive policy seems so obviously antithetical to long-term American interests that it is really hard to make sense of (except if one does what should be the unthinkable and puts it in the frightening context of a grander plan to eventually force regime change in Iran as well, in which case the rationale for these leaders to hold on to the Iranian connection would disappear). Democrats appear to be equally ignorant about the survival of Iraqi nationalist sentiment, but they express this in a different policy: acceptance of Iranian influence in Iraq as something natural. This was even written into Obama’s “New Strategy for a New World”, released in mid-July. Commenting on Iraq, Obama writes, “Iraq is not going to be a perfect place…we are not going to … eliminate every trace of Iranian influence”. He seems unaware that this particular statement may be seen as deeply offensive by many Iraqi Shiites who are proud of their Iraqi identity but fearful of Iran and the pro-Iranian elites that have been empowered by the Bush administration. Their fear is that a new Democratic administration will accord Iran exaggerated influence in Iraq as part of a grand, Dayton-style regional settlement designed as an antidote to the Bush administration’s unilateralist policies.

Of course, Obama’s stance flows from a multi-lateralist attitude which in itself is laudable. In general, it makes sense for the United States to rely more on national and regional equilibriums than to seek to micro-manage in the name of democracy. But in the specific case of Iraq, there is a responsibility for correcting past mistakes as part of a viable exit strategy. Democrats cannot simply close their eyes and imagine that the Iraq of 2008 in any way represents a natural state of affairs, and that a quick withdrawal automatically will prompt some kind of Hobbesian reset whereby the country will find back to its true self. Real change in Iraq would mean that Obama realised that for five years straight the United States has promoted and consolidated an artificial sectarian system in the country, and that disengagement from Iraq should also aim at reversing this trend. The real challenge is not to reconcile Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds but to bring Powers That Aren’t into the system. The instrument to do this is not some kind of federalism magic or a complex oil distribution formula, but to move away from the sectarian quota system more generally and towards a traditional state model with autonomy for the Kurds and more modest decentralisation in the rest of the country. And Biden should remember that the only thing that is artificial about today’s Iraq is the particular selection of sectarian leaders that the Bush administration has anointed to lead the country, and the exaggerated Iranian influence that comes with some of them.

The USG Formally Embraces the Minority View in the Kirkuk Question

Yesterday, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker explicitly extended his support to a UN proposal of delaying the provincial council vote in Kirkuk apparently without making any substantial changes to the province’s current political line-up, while allowing the vote to go ahead in the rest of Iraq’s governorates. It is noteworthy that this is the model that was earlier rejected by a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians (who favoured a new power-sharing arrangement in Kirkuk in the interim), and was not brought to a vote despite attempts by the government to push it through in early August after the presidential council had vetoed the decision of the Iraqi parliament to create a power-sharing regime in Kirkuk.

The upside of the UN approach to Kirkuk is that it is part of a grand strategy of diluting territorial issues in northern Iraq by tackling them piecemeal, starting with the easiest ones. This is a good approach because there are certain “disputed” areas that are not really disputed and which many Iraqis, regardless of ethnic origin, would be quite happy to assign to the Kurdish federal region. This approach would also contain the application of the concept of “disputed territories” to the north – an important factor with regard to political stability given that ISCI in particular has shown a proclivity for thinking in similar terms in the south, for example in possible border adjustments between Karbala and Anbar. Theoretically this could form the basis for a grand compromise on territorial changes in the north that could bring closure to the Iraqi federalism debate and a renewed focus on development issues more broadly.

What is less clear is why this process should require a perpetuation of the status quo in the provincial government of Kirkuk. If instead steps towards a modicum of power sharing were implemented, there are greater chances that any grand “final status” deal would enjoy credibility in the eyes of the majority of Iraqis. The proposal of the majority of the Iraqi parliament needs not be the perfect approach, but there is a clearly expressed desire not to carry on with existing arrangements, which are seen as strongly supportive of the Kurdish position. This stance represents a challenge to the forces that see the 2005 constitution and the political set-up it created as a viable way forward, and for the USG to persevere in ignoring the majority of the Iraqi parliament on this issue seems like an almost self-destructive strategy. If anything, the forces that find it difficult to consider Kirkuk as anything other than “Iraqi” – and which therefore are reluctant to acquiesce in what is seen as undemocratic special arrangements for the area – are probably even stronger outside parliament than inside it.

More on Diyala

Today there is an attempt by Iraqi authorities to gloss over the Diyala episode by blaming it on technical misunderstandings between various arms of the Iraqi security apparatus: the local police versus a special force from Baghdad. This cannot disguise the fact that a week ago, and reportedly by consensus, the provincial council which includes 20 members from the Shiite Islamist camp (many of them ISCI*) voted to oust the police chief, Ghanim al-Qurayshi, whom Baghdad had earlier appointed probably with the support of Nuri al-Maliki and Jawad al-Bulani. Demonstrations against the dismissal, allegedly to a large degree made up of members of the police loyal to Qurayshi, had met with the disapproval of the governor who has ties to ISCI. There clearly is some kind of intra-Shiite dimension to this affair, but it remains unclear whether it is a case of a local branch of ISCI cooperating with non-Shiites in a bid to oust an outsider appointed by Maliki, or another example of tension between ISCI and forces more loyal to Maliki.

* The list of coalitions from the Iraqi electoral commission dated 20 December 2004 provides the following overview of the constituent elements of the two formal political alliances in Diyala: List 302, the Kurdish-Turkmen-Arab Alliance, made up of PUK and KDP (the two biggest Kurdish parties), and list 339, the Alliance of the Islamic and Nationalist Forces in Diyala, consisting of three elements: Daawa, SCIRI and Badr. In the January 2005 elections, list 302 won 7 seats, list 339 won 20 seats, and list 351, the Sunni-dominated IIP, got 14 seats.

The Powers That Are Divided among Themselves

Recent events in Diyala provide yet another indication that all is not well inside Iraq’s ruling establishment, especially with regard to its dominant component of Shiite Islamists. Presumably with the support of premier Nuri al-Maliki, Iraqi government forces yesterday raided the premises of Diyala governor Raad Rashid al-Mulla Jawad (linked to ISCI in many reports). Earlier, on 12 August, the chief of police in Diyala was sacked by the provincial assembly, ostensibly because he had promoted “ex-Baathists” to high positions in the local police force. The interior ministry was reportedly unhappy with the action taken by the provincial assembly.

On the surface, Diyala seems like a manifest example of the alliance between Kurds and ISCI that forms the increasingly feeble parliamentary backbone of Nuri al-Maliki’s government: these two forces dominate the local assembly and key positions in the local administration. However, these fiefs now appear to be coming under attack from forces loyal to Maliki himself. Before he was accused of promoting “Baathists” in Diyala, the sacked police commander, Ghanim al-Qurayshi, had reportedly been under consideration for transfer to Basra to assume even more important security tasks, suggesting that he has friends close to Maliki.

This is not the first time there has been friction inside the Shiite establishment. On 29 May, the provincial council in Dhi Qar rejected the interior ministry’s appointment of Sabah al-Fatlawi, against the votes of the Daawa (Tanzim al-Iraq) branch. Earlier, in February, Daawa along with Fadila had sidelined the provincial security council where ISCI was strong, prompting protests from ISCI about the police forces “becoming politicised”. And all too often it is forgotten that the top Basra security officials that came under attack by ISCI and the Sayyid al-Shuhada movement shortly before the military operation in Basra in March were in fact Maliki appointees. In light of examples like these, it is extremely difficult to maintain the common notion that ISCI has perfect control of the Iraqi security forces in most part of the country, although in the case of Diyala it remains unclear whether this is the result of an internal split inside ISCI (national versus local leaderships) or tensions between ISCI and Daawa.

Meanwhile, the corporate media is already feverishly reporting the Diyala developments as a purely sectarian affair, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Sunni Islamist IIP holds only 14 seats out of 41 on the provincial council that voted to oust the Shiite police commander (and whose governor is also a prominent Shiite leader who used to be criticised for ties to Badr).

[Most of this note is also available in an Arabic translation provided by the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Iraq.]

The Kirkuk Issue Exposes Weaknesses in Iraq’s Ruling Coalition

Yesterday’s failure of the Iraqi parliament to pass the provincial elections law before the summer recess may well end up being blamed on Sadrists and other “recalcitrants” who refused to give up their principles and adopt a more “businesslike” attitude. Or, alternatively, as an AP headline puts it today, “Iraqi election bill falls to ethnic rivalry”. However, quite apart from issues related to Islamic radicalism or ethnic identities, first and foremost the parliamentary deliberations of the elections law exposed some of the fundamental weaknesses and contradictions of Pax Americana in Iraq.

It may be useful to briefly recapitulate why there was a desire for provincial elections in Iraq in the first place, and which forces tried to resist this pressure. On the one hand, there was a broad alliance of parties that pushed the elections agenda forward, and insisted on the insertion of a timeline in the legislation that was adopted in February this year. This group featured cross-sectarian cooperation and participation by secularists as well as Islamists, with the key parties being the Sadrists (Shiite Islamist), Fadila (Shiite Islamist), Tawafuq (Sunni Islamist), al-Hiwar al-Watani (Iraqi nationalist, mostly Sunni) and Iraqiyya (nationalist, secular-leaning). Those who opposed the prospect of early elections were primarily the Kurdish parties and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, Shiite Islamist), with some support from the Daawa party of Iraqi premier Nuri al-Maliki. The opponents of the elections – who had everything to lose because they gained power in the controversial January 2005 local elections which many Sunni and Shiite parties boycotted – tried to scotch the law by using the presidential veto, but finally changed their position after a visit to Baghdad by US vice president Dick Cheney in March.

In the period after the final adoption of the provincial powers law, the more detailed elections bill (required to establish the exact modalities of the elections) stalled in parliament for several months. Again, the principal obstructionists seemed to be the coalition partners of the Maliki government: all of a sudden ISCI became very focused on the issue of female quotas, whereas simultaneously the Kurds supported ISCI in special demands which included closed elections lists and permission to use religious symbols and places of worship during campaigning – all ostensibly on account of the high degree of illiteracy in Iraq. These machinations notwithstanding, the Iraqi parliament finally passed the elections law on 22 July. But while the Maliki government had gradually become quite involved in influencing the law in the directions it wanted, not everything in the final version was to the government’s liking. In particular, the government parties objected to a clause inserted in the last minute featuring a power-sharing formula for the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk (inhabited by Turkmens, Kurds and Arabs) pending elections there. The clause alienated the Kurds who are already in control of the provincial council on the basis of controversial elections held back in January 2005 and wanted to keep the status quo with a view to holding a future referendum about the status of the city. It also drew criticism from the Kurds’ ally among the Shiites – ISCI. As these forces had done with the provincial powers law that had earlier challenged their position, they once more used the presidential veto to send the bill back to parliament.

Why was the Kirkuk clause inserted, who did it, and why could it derail the whole elections process in Iraq? The question of who did it is easy to answer. The clause was supported by many of the same parties that had earlier challenged the Maliki government to hold provincial elections by October: Sadrists, Fadila, Hiwar, and Iraqiyya. Conversely, the power-sharing formula for Kirkuk was opposed by the Kurds, ISCI, some Shiite independents, and some members of Maliki’s Daawa party. It seems probable that at least some of the parties of the Sunni Islamist Tawafuq bloc joined the opposition parties in the secret vote on power sharing for Kirkuk, although there were reports that individual elements of the alliance wavered and were more prepared to make compromises with the Kurds – in particular the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP).

As for the underlying reasons for the voting patterns, deeper antagonisms have been at work. For some time, these two constellations of parties have faced each other in what is the most salient battlefront in Iraqi politics today – far more important than those supposedly “irreconcilable differences between Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis” on which some Western analysts like to dwell. Firstly, to a considerable extent, this is a raw battle of power and shares of the pie, as Sam Parker of the United States Institute of Peace pointed out when he coined the dichotomy “the Powers That Aren’t” (PTA, the Sadrists, Fadila, Iraqiyya, most Sunni groups) and “the Powers That Be” (PTB, the Kurds, ISCI, Daawa and the IIP) to describe the struggle between the two sides, first in an anonymous guest post on the Abu Aardvark blog, and later in an NYT interview. Secondly, to some extent this is also about ideology, with centrists versus ethno-federalists constituting the principal cleavage. The centrists are sceptical to any weakening Baghdad’s power and to any extension of the federalism principle south of Kurdistan. Above all, they have misgivings against an ethno-sectarian implementation of federalism that would partition Iraq into three statelets – Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite. The ethno-federalists, on the other hand, favour precisely this kind of Balkans approach to Iraq: they want a free hand for the Kurds in Kirkuk, in exchange for support for Shiite sectarian supremacy in the rest of Iraq – either through Shiite dominance in Baghdad, or through the establishment of a Shiite sectarian region south of Baghdad.

The two dichotomies are not one hundred per cent overlapping. While most of the Powers That Be are also ethno-federalists, some of them aren’t – most importantly, this includes prime minister Nuri al-Maliki himself. And it is precisely ideology that is the great weakness of the PTB, as the Kirkuk issue amply demonstrates. In a perfect world, the PTB would have been able to hold on to their positions of power, successfully excluding everyone else simply by exploiting their leverage at the centre of government in one of the world’s most important oil-producing nations. They would have divvied up the oil income, and ISCI and Maliki would have gladly and effortlessly ceded the disputed city of Kirkuk to the Kurds. Powers That Be are primarily concerned with grabbing power and holding on to it; they are less focused on such things as ideological coherence. But instead something else has happened: negotiations over the oil law have stalled since 2006, mostly because of disputes inside the PTB camp, where the Kurds have disagreed with just about everyone else about who should have the right to sign contracts (central or provincial government) and what oil fields should be considered outside the jurisdiction of the central government. Also ISCI’s enthusiasm for creating a mirror image of Kurdistan in Iraq seems to have abated somewhat, probably influenced by the realisation that the provinces where the oil is concentrated – Basra and Maysan – are quite hostile to the idea of a single Shiite federal entity. And when the Kirkuk issue came up recently, it became painfully clear that the Powers That Be did not enjoy sufficient parliamentary support to proceed with their preferred solution – a delay of the vote in Kirkuk without any changes to the local administration, which effectively would have perpetuated Kurdish hegemony in the province. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the negotiations, Daawa officials tried to put a brave face on things, commenting that they were looking for a consensual solution rather than a simple majority decision. However, that seemed disingenuous: it masked the fact that this time the Powers That Be were unable to muster the votes required for their preferred solution and did not anymore command the sort of majority that had enabled them to ram through federalism legislation in October 2006 (no sweet talk about consensus back then). Significantly, the ideological dimension linked to Kirkuk proved important enough to prompt defections even inside the PTB ranks this time, with reports of friction inside the normally cohesive ISCI (between the political and the military wings), and with several of the politicians that have provided token Sunni representation inside the system aligning themselves with the PTA (as the arithmetic of the 22 July vote attests to).

In this way the PTB were forced to resort to their emergency weapon: the presidential veto. By 2008, parliamentary majorities simply aren’t sufficient in Iraq: instead, bills are vetoed and lifted out of the parliamentary debate for closed-doors discussions among the “political leaderships”, which is mostly a euphemism for The Powers That Be themselves. This is what has happened to the oil legislation, the constitutional revision, and, this time around, the provincial elections law. The net result is that the PTB consolidate their grip on power, and no meaningful moves towards national reconciliation take place.

At the same time, the fact that the Powers That Be are unable to hold together is a remarkable testament to the endurance of certain Iraqi nationalist values that simply refuse to give way to the PTB agenda and that seem bound to create problems for the overall stability of the current system in the long term. Symptomatically, ISCI politician Jalal al-Din al-Saghir condemned unnamed politicians for having “listened to popular feeling” about Kirkuk – a cardinal sin from the Powers That Be perspective. Similarly, Kurdish politician Abdallah Salih recently commented that “those who are in favour of the [22 July version of the] provincial elections law reject the constitution”. The fact is that Iraqi politicians mobilise on the Kirkuk issue precisely because they think it is something that a majority of Iraqis care about. They feel they are on safe ground when challenging aspects of the 2005 constitution precisely because they realise that popular affection for parts of the constitution is not particularly strong (many Iraqis had no idea about the implications of the charter they voted for back in October 2005). In fact, Salih was spot on: a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians do want to make changes to the constitution, but the PTB themselves are fighting tooth and nail to prevent this by blocking any real progress in the constitutional revision committee. For example, in the committee there are numerous suggestions for giving Kirkuk some kind of special status (instead of holding an early referendum), but due to the disproportionate representation of the PTB in the committee and its leading positions, these parties are capable of controlling the agenda and voting down any challenges to their own position.

At least, the actions of PTB are understandable: they simply want to grab ever more power, and to exclude everyone else. What is more difficult to understand is the behaviour of the international players. Why, for example, does the United States continue to support this steadily declining force? Previously, Washington may have considered them more malleable and susceptible to pressure, even if this factor is less evident today, and despite the fact that question marks concerning Iran’s influence in the PTB camp linger. But the Iraq that is being built by reliance on the PTB simply isn’t a sustainable one. Because it is based on appetite for power and extreme opportunism alone, it cannot survive except through the application of brute force and the use of material power: concrete walls (as seen in Baghdad), bribes to political enemies (particularly prominent among the Sunni tribes), and authoritarian handling of internal opponents (such as the Sadrists). When Washington’s ability and willingness to finance these kinds of measures come to an end, the only way forward will be increased authoritarianism or increased reliance on regional patrons.

On the other hand, historical depth, resonance among the Iraqi public, and professionalism are the key ingredients that are missing in the new Iraq. PTB ideology is exceedingly shallow, as seen for example in the Kurdish demand to have Kirkuk considered as some kind of “Jerusalem”: whereas parts of the countryside in the province do have long-standing Kurdish traditions, just half a century ago the city itself was dominated by Turkmens who for hundreds of years had been so important in the administration of Iraq that the toponymic construction “Kirkukli” was common in the titles of Ottoman officials from Sulaymaniyya to Basra. Similarly, the PTB have invented the idea of a Shiite federal region – an entity whose name no one had even heard about prior to 2005. And when it comes to professionalism, the PTB have been so successful in alienating almost a whole generation of highly skilled Iraqi bureaucrats that it is entirely unsurprising that Iraqi oil revenue is not being channelled into development projects but rather is becoming a tool at the disposal of the PTB. Characteristically, Haydar al-Abbadi of the Daawa party was among the first Iraqis to dismiss recent American reports that Iraqi oil revenue is being accumulated by the government instead of being invested in new infrastructure.

Finally, why does even the United Nations so uncritically enter the game on the side of the Powers That Be? In Kirkuk they have clearly adopted the solution preferred by the PTB: more delays and more committees, with the big issues being removed from the public spotlight, and with Kurdish dominance being gradually expanded on the ground. Instead, the international community should see the highlighting of the Kirkuk issue by the PTA as an early warning about the very durability of the new political system in Iraq. The opposition powers are becoming exasperated with the Maliki government’s highhanded approach to the forthcoming elections, and may have felt that there was so much rigging and gerrymandering and deliberate procrastination underway that it was better to attack the fundamentals of the system by pushing the Kirkuk issue – even if the prospect of early elections now seems more distant than ever, and the PTB will try to spin the whole affair as grandstanding by the PTA. But at a time when the fundament of the new Iraqi system seems increasingly shaky, the international debate on Iraq continues to focus almost exclusively on the recent reduction of US casualties in the country, completely ignoring the issues that relate to long-term regional stability.