Opinion

While we weren’t looking, hope sprung in Iraq

In one of those ironies of history, with President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in disarray, some relatively good pieces of news are coming from places that Obama turned his back on.

Last month, Afghanistan showed that it can work for a better future while Obama prepares to write it off and run away. And now, Iraq, which Obama abandoned as a lost cause at the start of his tenure, is repeating the success of the Afghan election with one of its own.

Days before Iraqi polls opened, US media were full of leaks from the Obama administration that Iraq was about to explode. One revived the old chestnut, marketed by then-Sen. Joseph Biden in 2004, that Iraq should be carved into three mini-states.

Iraq’s success in holding general elections, its fourth since liberation and the first since Obama decided to run away, comes as a pleasant surprise.

Islamic terrorists of all ilks both Sunni and Shi’ite failed to frighten the people away from the polls. Over 12 million of the 20 million eligible to vote did so, a turnout of 60% and thus higher than the average for the three previous exercises.

The terrorists splashed their deadly slogan “Ballot box leads to coffin” on walls in Baghdad and other cities. They launched 50 attacks, including suicide bombings, and killed 160 people but did not succeed in scaring everyone away.

Even in the predominantly Arab Sunni province of al-Anbar, the coalition of Islamic terror known as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) failed to close all polling stations. Jihadis poured in from neighboring countries to offer local killers a hand. And, yet, in al-Anbar over 70% of the localities did vote. Only Fallujah was unable to hold the election.

That Iraqis are determined to choose and change governments through elections rather than traditional Arab methods such as assassination or military coup was underlined by the presence of more than 9,000 candidates, an all-time record, contesting the 328 seats of the parliament that will name the next government.

The diversity of rival candidates’ lists resembled an ideological smorgasbord unknown in other Muslim countries.

Though many old figures, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, maintained a high profile, the election brought forward a new generation of home-grown young politician more in tune with native aspirations than the exiles that came back in the wake of US troops in 2003.

Maliki may be tempted to grab as much power as he can, but the machinery of oppression has been broken. Thanks to the proportional representation system of elections and the decisive role of the parliament, not to mention a large measure of provincial autonomy, power in new Iraq is too diffuse to allow authoritarian rule. If Maliki tries to become a dictator, he’ll have plenty of people trying to stop him.

The focus of the elections was on bread-and-butter issues, indicating a desire to discard old Arab obsessions about absurd slogans such as “creating the great Arab state” or “spreading Islam across the globe.”

While jihadis were the biggest losers, the mullahs of Tehran also lost.

The coalition they had nurtured among Shi’ites disintegrated and is unlikely to be put together anytime soon. Tehran still has several cards, including the maverick mullah Muqtada Sadr and the remnants of his Mahdi Army. But Tehran’s principal Iraqi ally, the Islamic High Council centered on the Hakim family, has decided to redefine as an exclusively Iraqi party. Its hope is to
promote Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi as the next prime minister.

Regardless of who might head the next government, Tehran’s hopes of imposing de facto control over Iraq’s predominantly Shi’ite provinces have suffered a setback.

Some circles in Tehran now talk of reviving the Qasr-Shirin Treaty signed between Iran and the Ottoman Empire in 1728 when the Ottomans annexed Iraq but acknowledged Iran’s right of “supervision” over Shi’ite holy shrines in Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf.

Tehran also lost in the three autonomous Kurdish provinces.

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by President Jalal Talabani, backed by Iran for the past 40 years, shrunk into a rump while openly pro-Iran Islamic groups all but disappeared.

Yet another welcome development was the decision by the Najaf clerical establishment, headed by Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, not to endorse any candidates’ list, encouraging the secularist streak in Iraqi politics.

Iraq is not out of the woods. But it is limping along on the right path. Four years ago, forming a new coalition government took almost 10 months. This time, too, we could expect long horse-trading the outcome of which is hard to guess. And that, in a country where the despot could name a new government in five minutes or have its members executed in another five, must be good news.

If only for that, the US-led liberation of Iraq must be rated a success both for Iraqis and the Americans who helped them gain freedom.