parties: they repudiated incumbents throughout the country, punishing them for their failure to perform. The results signaled that the civil war was over. People felt secure enough to look for new representatives and to begin to demand the provision of services and proper governance. The January 2009 votes by Arab and other non-Kurdish Iraqis were in favor of a strong centralized government that was not openly sectarian. In 2009 explicitly sectarian and religious parties were rejected, but Shiites still voted for Shiite parties and Sunnis voted for Sunni parties, and it seemed Iraq’s elections had crystallized internal differences, entrenching sectarianism.
Between August 2009 and January 2010 Baghdad suffered four major coordinated terrorist attacks. The August 2009 bombings were spectacular and devastating. At the foreign ministry three hundred people were killed or wounded from a local staff of five hundred. Maliki blamed Syria and created a diplomatic scandal. Iran offered to intervene and act as intermediary, but Iraq chose Turkey as the intermediary instead. The Iraqi government failed to convince anybody that Syria had played a role, but the effort was seen as an example of the government strategy of deliberately picking fights with neighbors. Despite these violent attacks, the political arena was the main front for disputes. And despite the sectarian competition for power, there were other divides and cross-sectarian alliances, especially in Parliament.
Maliki, for instance, had a particularly acrimonious relationship with the Parliament, which was the strongest one in Iraqi history, able to check the power of the executive. In 2009 Parliament charged Abdul Falah al-Sudani, the trade minister, who came from Maliki’s Dawa Party, with corruption. The Integrity Committee subjected him to fierce questioning, which was broadcast on television. Interestingly, the head of the Integrity Committee was from the Shiite Fadhila Party, which showed that politics in Iraq didn’t necessarily rotate on a Shiite-Sunni axis. Parliament also cut funding for Maliki’s Tribal Support Councils.
Maliki’s Dawa was still an elitist party without grassroots support and with no ability to mobilize the street. Despite relative improvements in security, Maliki had failed to deliver notable improvements in services. In both the 2009 and 2010 elections, Iran tried and failed to unite Maliki with the Sadrists and the Supreme Council, but Maliki spurned them because with them he had no guarantee of occupying the prime minister’s position. Maliki tried and failed to reach a nonsectarian alliance with Allawi and Mutlaq in the months leading up to the 2010 elections.
The Supreme Council included more women on its list, even unveiled ones. The parties were forced to mature; even the sectarian ones turned to technocrats as candidates. They were responding to pressure from the 2009 elections, when sect and religion were discredited as sufficient to win elections.
In 2008 a new de-Baathification law was passed—this time by the Iraqis—and a new commission was supposed to be established, with new staff and new rules. But this never happened, and the same people who were appointed by Paul Bremer’s CPA in 2003 remained in control—including the director, Ali al-Lami (whose origins were exposed in Chapter Two), and the postwar Sadrists from Ur, who allied with the ubiquitous chairman of the committee, Ahmad Chalabi.
The de-Baathification Committee, now renamed the Accountability and Justice Commission, announced in January 2010 that it was banning 511 candidates from the elections for being former Baathists. The Independent High Electoral Commission approved the decision, as did Maliki. Curiously, Accountability and Justice Commission leaders such as Lami and Chalabi were candidates in the March elections as well. The timing made it clear that the committee was politicized, as did the massive list of candidates who were banned.
While many of the banned candidates were secular Shiites, the best known were Sunnis, and it was the nonsectarian parties that suffered the most from the decision. Candidates with a Sunni base were especially targeted, regardless of whether they were Sunni or Shiite. In Iraq secular Arab nationalism is often wrongly identified by sectarian Shiites to be Sunni and Baathist. The ban was also a great way for the weakened religious Shiite parties to eliminate their rivals. Mutlaq was the most prominent victim, but even Abdel Qader al-Obeidi, the defense minister and an ally of Maliki who was running on his list, was targeted.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, as well as Christopher Hill, the American ambassador, played on Iraqi fears by accusing Lami and Chalabi of working on behalf of Iran, hoping to ruin Chalabi’s long ambition of becoming prime minister. As the Americans’ former anointed one, Chalabi had better access to them than any other Iraqi in 2003 and 2004, and he benefited from them more than any other politician. According to a CIA source, he certainly would have had secrets to sell. But even Chalabi was not a proxy or tool; it was possible to be a sectarian Shiite actor in Iraq without being controlled by the Iranians. Iran had pawns in Iraq but not proxies. It had groups who were poor and desperate but did not willingly do Iran’s bidding. Even then the Supreme Council hated Iran. Its members remembered the humiliation of being looked down upon by Iranians for being Arabs. When they were in Iran all the Supreme Council men wanted was to get out of Iran. If the so-called pro-Iranian groups took power they would not need Iranian support. They would have access to their own resources and power. As long as the Americans were in Iraq then Iran had an existential interest in undermining American efforts. The rise of Turkey as a regional actor with influence and popularity among Arabs counterbalanced both Iran and Saudi Arabia, creating a third pole. The Turks wanted to turn the Kurdish regional government in the north into a Turkish vassal state. Meanwhile the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad was so active internally that he was called in to the foreign ministry twice for them to issue formal complaints about his meddling.
Prime Minister Maliki had cultivated an image as a nationalist with a petrostate agenda: a powerful leader spreading Iraq’s oil wealth. He had even flirted with ex-Baathist Sunni candidates in the past. The de-Baathification moves by Chalabi and his allies were designed to force Maliki back into the sectarian camp. If he supported the decision, he would lose support among Sunnis and nonsectarian Shiites. But if he opposed it, he would lose support among many Shiites.
Maliki’s candidate in Diyala, Muhammad Salman, explained that Maliki still had his base of Shiite voters and that he could not reach out to or defend ex-Baathists like Mutlaq at their expense, lest he lose Shiite voters. Because of this Maliki quickly backed the de-Baathification move, even though his ally Defense Minister Obeidi was on the list. With false rumors of a Baathist coup and the recent bombings, the environment was ripe for targeting opponents under the pretext of anti-Baathism. The campaign took a sectarian turn thanks to the de-Baathification crisis. Anti-Sunnism masqueraded as anti-Baathism, with gruesome posters of mass graves and different Iraqi TV stations, each controlled by a political party, showing videos of Baathist torture and executions. Former Prime Minister Jaafari warned on his posters that he would not give space for the return of the Baathists.
President Jalal Talabani condemned the ban and questioned the committee’s legal existence. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden rushed to Baghdad to try to pressure the Iraqi government to resolve the crisis, with the support of the European Union and the United Nations. But the Americans had lost their leverage, as they often said starting in 2009, when Maliki grew more confident of his ability to survive without them. The appeals committee decided that there wasn’t enough time before the election to review the appeals, so it postponed decisions about them until after the elections—meaning candidates who won could still be banned after the fact.
Then Maliki made the appeals committee overturn its decision to delay matters and review some of the candidates immediately. Two dozen decisions were reversed, including the one banning Obeidi but importantly not the one banning Mutlaq. The election commission then approved all this maneuvering. Allawi, in turn, threatened to boycott the elections, and Mutlaq initially called for one (though he later changed his mind, probably because he would have been ignored anyway). Meanwhile, beyond the Green Zone, candidates throughout Iraq were being intimidated and blown up, including allies of Maliki, who may have been targeted by the Mahdi Army.
Since the beginning of the Iraq War, American planners and observers had been preoccupied with the consequences of decisive singular events—from the arrest of Saddam Hussein to the battle for Falluja and the previous rounds of national and provincial elections. At each easily identifiable juncture, exaggerated claims were advanced by those in search of a turning point, whether for the better or for the worse.
The elections of March 7 were the first to be held in a formally sovereign Iraq, and they
But regardless of the outcome—Maliki contested but could not overturn the vote count—the elections would not precipitate a return to the civil war. The state was too strong, and there was no longer a security vacuum. The security forces took their work seriously—perhaps too seriously. The sectarian militias had been beaten and
