Iraqi provincial elections

Juan Cole at Informed Comment 02/01/09 gives an unsparing judgment of the poltical situation reflected in the provincial elections that took place Saturday:

Early reports say that 60% of Iraqi's electorate came out for Saturday's election of provincial councils. The results will be announced by the end of this week, and only after "weeks" will the final tally be published. There was a lockdown of the whole country, in which US troops assisted, with no private automobiles allowed to run. Given this datum, the breathless newspaper headlines that the elections came off without any major attacks are reporting a given. Guerrillas can't detonate a car bomb if they can't drive a car to their target.

Glitches prevented thousands of voters from casting their ballots McClatchy says, causing big demonstrations and protest rallies to be held. The Iraqi government electoral high commission said that the main problem was that some Iraqis had not registered and then just showed up expecting to be able to vote anyway. There were widespread reports of vote-buying.

American corporate media will report the Iraqi provincial elections as a vindication of the 2003 US invasion of that country, and as a sign that Iraqis are eager to be like Americans. In places like Sadr City, the teeming slums of East Baghdad, many Iraqis voted as a protest against continued US military presence. Likewise, Sunni fundamentalists saw the vote as an assertion of Iraqi sovereignty. The elections come in the wake of the Status of Forces Agreement that pledges all US troops will be out of the country by 2011, and in the wake of the election of Barack Obama in the US, who has committed to having most US troops out in 16 months. The sharp fall in deaths of civilians and security personnel in January, to 189, is not a sign that Bush won but rather that the Iraqis have. No point in blowing things up if the US is leaving anyway, and less reason to resist the new federal Iraqi government if Sunni Arab elites can rule their own provinces.

It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure. [my emphasis]

He also gives the names of the parties in Prime Minister al-Maliki's current electoral coalition, which we don't often see named in regular press reports:

Al-Maliki's coalition consists of the Islamic Mission Party, the Islamic Mission Party - Iraq Organization, Solidarity in Iraq, The Islamic Union of Iraqi Turkmen, the Iraqi Fayli Kurdish Brotherhood Movement, the 1991 Popular Iraqi Uprising Bloc and independents. The core of this coalition is the two major branches of the Da'wa Party, the oldest Shiite fundamentalist party in Iraq, founded around 1958. ... Although Da'wa or the Islamic Mission Party is Shiite fundamentalists, it is not a clerical party and it is not as close to Iran as ISCI. It is benefitting from a perception that al-Maliki has gotten a handle on the security situation. [my emphasis]