Some post-Iraq election analysis

In State of the Union Address and the Burning Bush doctrine, I asked if anyone thought that the Bush administration would allow an Islamic party to rise to power in Iraq and then noted that Rumskull had already provided an answer in April 2003: "If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn't going to happen." The apparent attitude of the Bush administration was concisely stated in the headline from Fox News: "Rumsfeld: Iraqis Can Form Own Gov't, Just Not a Religious One."

What happens if the Iraqis elect a bunch of people from a religious (rather than secular) party? Will the U.S. keep them from truly taking power? If so, that would not exactly be letting people from other countries freely choose a government that reflects their values and culture, now would it?

I ask these questions because of the results to date of the Iraqi election. On February 5, CNN gave this early report: "Early Iraqi poll returns from three key groups of voters show a coalition backed by the nation's top Shiite cleric ahead of the U.S.-backed interim leader and his secular party, according to sources close to the election." The Shiite coalition is the United Iraqi Alliance, and the secular party backed by the the U.S. is led by interim prime minister Ayad Allawi. MSNBC published an article on February 6 which gave some more details:

In figures released by the election commission Friday, more than two-thirds of the 3.3 million votes counted so far went to the (United Iraqi) Alliance. The faction headed by Allawi, a secular Shiite, trailed with about 18 percent, or more than 579,700 votes.

Wow--67% for the religious party to 18% for the secular party favored by the Bush administration. The article did, however, contain a qualifier: "The partial returns were from 10 mostly southern provinces that are predominantly Shiite, and the Alliance had been expected to win big there." The New York Times explained this further in a February 6 article ("Results Show Islamic Parties Surging Ahead in Iraqi Vote") by noting that no results had been released from the provinces north of Baghdad, "where large numbers of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and other groups are expected to do well." In other words, most of the returns were from the south, where the Shiites are a vast majority, so of course the United Iraqi Alliance got most of the votes there.

The February 6 NYT article also included some returns from Baghdad: "On Sunday (February 5), with 40 percent of the polling stations in Baghdad reporting results, the leading three political groups were all Shiite affiliated. Together, they had 583,443 votes out of 921,569 that had been counted." So the Shiites were winning in Baghdad as well as the south.

But what about the north? A February 8 article from the New York Times revealed that

The partial election returns released Monday showed that in Salahuddin Province in the north parties representing Shiites and Kurds, as well as the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite leader, took nearly 50 percent of the vote, with the closest Sunni leader, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's interim president, taking 13 percent.

*******

The results from the north allowed the main Kurdish political alliance to cut into the strong national lead established in earlier returns by the Shiite alliance that has as its patron the country's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

But what about the rest of central Iraq? That's where the Sunni triangle is, and it is the homeland of Saddam Hussein. Surely, the religious Shiite parties would not fare well there. Well, the February 8 NYT article is entitled "Shiites Leading in Hussein's Home Province." This article contains a good deal of information about the present and possible political landscape in Iraq as of February 8, but I will discuss a limited amount in this post. The lead paragraph stated that

The first election returns from the Sunni majority heartland north of Baghdad showed Monday that a low Sunni turnout in Saddam Hussein's home province has given a lead in the voting there to a Shiite political alliance led by the southern clerics who were among Mr. Hussein's most bitter enemies.

This means that the Shiite alliance overwhelmingly won in the south AND looks like it might win the central part of the country as well, meaning that the results in the north are the only ones that have cut into the Shiites' huge lead in the beginning. The February 8 article also gave the percentages as of that date:

With 4.6 million votes now tallied, the Shiite alliance still accounts for just more than 50 percent of the national vote, down from more than 70 percent in initial counts last week. The Kurdish alliance now has 25 percent, and Dr. Allawi, the interim prime minister, 13 percent.

Officials estimate that 8 million Iraqis voted, which means that with over half the votes counted, the religious parties hold an outright majority, and the party backed by the Bush administration is way, way behind.

What I have tried to do in this post is stick to results. I have not addressed all the charges of irregularities in the election, or the fact that many Sunnis did not vote. For now, I just want to point out that, despite Rumskull's opinion, there is a chance that Iraq--through democratic elections--will be ruled by people led by religious clerics. Then we will see just what Bush meant by his Inaugural Address and the State of the Union Address.

Subsequent posts will examine the Sunni issue and the chances of religion and Islamic law becoming the controlling forces in Iraq.