Iraq holds peaceful provincial elections, but sectarian tensions remain

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Barack Obama: "I congratulate the people of Iraq on holding significant provincial elections... This important step forward should continue the process of Iraqis taking responsibility for their future."

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In response to yesterday's relatively peaceful, if not entirely successful, provincial elections in Iraq, our friend Cernig provided some typically insightful context and analysis:

The majority of Iraq has voted in provincial elections today, with a very minimum of violence, as I had hoped. Which is great news but unsurprising given the massive security lockdown mounted for the event. Razorwire cordons, security checkpoints, closed airports and a total ban on vehicular traffic in cities - all just to have an election. Still, that it happened at all is encouraging, even if far from the shining victory the American right are hailing it as. I hate to rain on their victory parade but there are a couple of flies in their Mission Accomplished" ointment.

Not least, of course, that such elections might never have happened at all if the Bush administration had had its way. Despite the popularity nowadays of the conservative meme that Bush wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, had wanted to simply keep US-appointed tame politicos in power. But Ayatollah Sistani demanded real elections with thinly veiled hints of a general Shiite insurrection to go with the Sunni-led insurgency if no elections were held, and a quick historical revision swifty ensued.

But there are still deep-seated problems in Iraq which these provincial election's won't touch, or will actually make worse. The Kurdish North didn't participate and neither did the disputed region of Kirkuk. Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga have already faced off there a few times and most analysts see Kurdish aspirations as the primary future source of violence. Then there's the resurgent Sunni minority, where the old and entirely undemocratic tribal power structure is set to be the election winner. And among Shiites, factional infighting which has fractured Maliki's own coalition heavily, looks to be another potential source of future violence. We may not know the full results for a month or more and there are going to be divisive allegations of intimidation, vote-rigging and double-crossing to navigate.

Excuse the long quote, but I think Cernig speaks for many of us here, and he makes some extremely important points. The elections are indeed "a good thing," but they are not the "universal panacea" that some on the right, among the Iraq War's most ardent enthusiasts, think they are.

Those of us who oppose the Iraq War, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq, whether we were reluctantly, hesitantly for the war at the start and then quickly turned against it, as was the case with me, or whether we were against it all along, as was the case with Obama, do not wish to see Iraq fail. There are exceptions, of course, but most of us, I think, want democracy to work there. We want the Iraqi people to be free, we want their rights, including the rights of women and minority groups, to be observed and protected, and we want peace to take hold.

Personally, I do think Iraq is better off without Saddam, whose brutal totalitarianism was among the worst of the past century, but it was the gross mismanagement of the war, driven by the delusions and prejudices of Bush and the warmongers, that allowed the post-Saddam vacuum to be dominated by sectarian civil war. And while there are positive signs to be taken from yesterday's elections, it seems to me that, on the one hand, whatever progress is being made is actually being made in spite of the U.S. war and occupation, if not in direct opposition to it, and that, on the other, many of the problems that have plagued post-Saddam Iraq remain firmly in place, including the sectarianism. The surface of Iraq may be relatively peaceful, at least more peaceful than it was a couple of years ago, but the old resentments and hostilities continue to seethe beneath the surface, threatening, as always, to rise up and destroy the thin veneer of apparent progress, that is, the thin veneer that the warmongers of the American right mistakenly take to be the whole reality of present-day Iraq.

As challenging as it may be, though, what is clear is that it is long past time for full Iraqi self-determination, that is, for the Iraqi people, as divided as they may still be, to assume responsibility for themselves and to determine their own future free from foreign occupation. And that can only happen once the U.S. leaves for good.