【Text/Observer Network Columnist Sun Jialing】
On October 10, 2021, Iraq held parliamentary elections, but after the results were revealed, it fell into months of political paralysis, and triggered the bloodshed of the August 29 people to storm the parliament building and rush into the "green zone" where foreign missions are located.
The Iraqi Prime Minister's Office was stormed by demonstrators. Image source: Visual China
Amid the chaos, political leader Sadr's armed support masses clashed violently with pro-Iranian militias, culminating in 30 deaths and more than 700 injuries, including 110 members of the Iraqi security forces who came to maintain order.
On August 30, Sadr called for support for the evacuation of the masses from the streets of Baghdad, and the chaotic situation returned to calm, and the Iraqi Joint Operations Command issued a statement on the afternoon of the same day announcing the lifting of the national curfew. However, although the unrest has stopped, Iraq's plight remains difficult to solve.
According to the United Nations, iraq has abundant oil and gas reserves, but one-third of its population lives in poverty, youth unemployment is as high as 40%, and the economic prospects are very bleak; At the same time, the political elite, trapped in the "political game" of alliances and foreign intervention, has not been able to form a new government, and even if the caretaker prime minister, Kadimi, will continue to serve, he will only be able to handle the daily affairs of Iraq.
In other words, the people will be forced to endure the long torment of incompetence in governance in the short term until they can't bear it and take to the streets again. From an Iraqi perspective, the outbreak of this conflict reflects the two major dilemmas of Iraqi politics in the "post-Saddam era": the counterattack of election and Iran's intervention in Iraq.
Selective antiphagy
First, Iraq's electoral system, which favors the survival of small parties, has contributed to part to a political impasse that has fallen since October 2021.
On October 10 last year, Iraq held elections for a new National Assembly, and out of a total of 329 seats, the "Sadr Movement" led by Shiite religious leader Sadr won 73 seats, making it the largest party in parliament. But under the Iraqi constitution, the first step in organizing a government is for parliament to vote more than two-thirds of the vote to elect the president, and the Sadr movement is clearly not yet in the threshold.
In this case, Sadr first allied himself with the Sunni Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP), led by the pro-Turkish Barzani of the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq, who holds 31 seats in parliament. However, even so, it is still difficult to reach the two-thirds majority threshold, and after that, even if Sadr threw an olive branch to the rest of the Kurdish parties and Sunni forces, he failed to form a two-thirds majority as desired.
At the same time, it is not only Sadr who intends to form a government, but also the "Coordination Framework" of a coalition of pro-Iranian Shiite parties. However, in this election, the pro-Iranian forces in Iraqi politics have been severely damaged, resulting in it also failing to reach the two-thirds threshold of electing a president. Take the Iranian-backed "Fatah Alliance" as an example, which still had 48 seats in the 2018 parliamentary elections, but this election plummeted to 17 seats, shrinking its territory by more than half.
In this case, the Sadr Movement, the largest party, was unable to successfully elect a president, but it had the ability to veto a presidential nomination nominated by the rival alliance. Such a state of "insufficient success and more than enough failures" on all sides has led to the continuous difficulty of childbirth in the new Iraqi government, and the stalemate has set a record for the "post-Saddam era". The further escalation of the situation has been a series of political changes since June.
On June 12, the 73-seat MPs of the Sadr Movement resigned en masse, citing protests against "Iranian proxies" interfering in Iraqi politics; However, under Iraqi law, if any seat in Parliament becomes vacant, it is filled by the second-highest-polling candidate in the constituency, so the total number of seats in the Coordination Framework rises to 122.
Pro-Iranian forces began to try to bypass the "Sadr Movement" to elect presidents and prime ministers, for example, former Iranian-backed Prime Minister Maliki volunteered to be prime minister, but was violently attacked by Sadr and his supporters; The Coordination Framework also nominated former Interior Minister Sultani, but Sadr's supporters were equally dissatisfied, believing that Sultani was a loyal supporter of Maliki and basically no different from Maliki.
After finding that the "retreat to advance" was not working well, the Sadr Movement began street demonstrations in July in all provinces of Iraq. On 27 July, demonstrators first attacked and broke into the Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad, but stayed only about two hours before heeding Sadr's call to leave; On July 30, thousands of Sadr movement supporters reoccupied parliament buildings and even broke into the "green zone" where foreign missions are located.
The green zone in Baghdad, Iraq, was hit by rockets and the Nasiriyah Municipal Building was closed. Image source: Visual China
According to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, about 125 people were injured in the chaos, including 100 demonstrators and 25 members of the security forces, and Sadr himself, who launched the occupation, did not quickly dissuade the masses, but until the 31st, he said on social networking sites that the sit-in was "an excellent opportunity to fundamentally challenge the political system, constitution and elections" and called on all Iraqis to join the "revolution".
On August 29, Sadr abruptly announced his "withdrawal from politics" and closed the Sadr Movement offices across Iraq. Hours later, Sadr's armed supporters stormed the Republican Palace in the Green Zone and clashed with pro-Iranian militias in the streets. The militia even fired rockets into the Green Zone, and the C-RAM air defense system of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was once loud. Iraqi security forces then expelled the demonstrators from the Palace of the Republic and demanded a ceasefire between the two sides, only to attract more demonstrators to "help".
Finally, on August 30, Sadr called on supporters to carry out a "peaceful revolution" and leave the Green Zone, saying that he did not want to be part of a violent revolution or want Iraqis to bleed, and the demonstrators gradually dispersed; Pro-Iranian militias have also called for "dialogue," but the government's impasse in difficult births has continued to this day.
Al-Sadr, Iraq's Shiite religious leader, said he would retire from politics. Image source: Visual China
Looking back at the above process, Sadr's series of political operations since June have been the trigger for intensifying the conflict, but one of the main causes of the political impasse is the issue of election.
Since the United States launched a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government in 2003, Iraq's politics has experienced countless twists and turns, and finally formed the current parliamentary democracy under the strong support of the United States and the reluctant consensus of various internal factions. In order to balance the Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and other forces within Iraq, its parliamentary election system adopts a "proportional representation system" that emphasizes "the weak also have the opportunity to speak out", rather than a "majority system", the former is prone to a party system with a large number of small parties, and the latter is relatively easy to spawn a two-party duel system.
From the perspective of political science, countries that practice the "proportional representation system" are extremely difficult to produce large parties with a stable parliamentary seat, so they often have to form a coalition of political parties and win more than half of the parliamentary seats before it is possible to govern. In other words, if a key small party withdraws from the ruling coalition, the regime will be forced to collapse and re-elect; If a ruling coalition of more than half of the seats is delayed, the country will be in a stalemate.
The reason why Israel has recently staged a political absurd drama that will lead to 5 general elections in 3 years is because different key small party parliamentarians have withdrawn from the ruling coalition, resulting in the collapse of the regime and can only be forced into the strange circle of general elections; Germany negotiated the formation of the government for 85 days after the 2013 federal elections, and Belgium had a 541-day government dystocia crisis from 2010 to 2011.
But even if "proportional representation" tends to lead to a proliferation of small parties, it will not lead to a stalemate if the Iraqi parliament can produce a ruling coalition with more than half of the seats. However, in addition to the proportional representation system, Iraq has adopted a sectarian distribution system similar to the Lebanese system of Muhasasa Ta'ifia in pursuit of leadership, which stipulates that the president must be a Kurdish, the prime minister must be Shiite, and the speaker of the national assembly must be Sunni, and after the parliamentary election results are released, the president must be elected by two-thirds of the consent threshold, and the president must re-appoint the prime minister and take office after being approved by the parliamentary vote, so that the government can be formed.
In other words, Iraq's coalition of political parties has two levels of governance, a two-thirds majority threshold tied to the election of a president, in addition to the same one-half parliamentary seats as a majority representative country. This design puts many Western countries, which are too strict standards.
The proportional representation system has been practiced in Iraq for many years, and even if the Iraqi parliamentary election system in 2021 has been adjusted from a pure proportional representation system to a non-transferable single-vote system (SNTV), its purpose is also to increase local representation, which is beneficial to the survival of small parties. Therefore, in the short term, Iraq's political form is unlikely to develop a typical republican two-party showdown system like that of the United States, but will continue to be multi-party.
Such a structure, once encountered with a political atmosphere that tears up consensus, it is easy to trigger a political deadlock. And that's another cause of the conflict, and the second political dilemma of the "post-Saddam era": Iran's intervention in Iraq.
Iran's intervention in Iraq
In short, Iranian-backed political forces that once rallied in Iraq are now increasingly ostracized by Iraqi public opinion, and the otherwise united Shiite camp has been divided, indirectly leading to the months-long political stalemate and the subsequent runaway bloodshed.
A review of Iran's involvement in Iraq dates back to the U.S. invasion in 2003. After the outbreak of the Iraq War, Iran was mixed: First, saddam Hussein regime had an 8-year blood feud with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, and now that it has fallen, Iran is naturally rejoicing; Second, Iran is also worried that it may become the next target of U.S. military intervention after Afghanistan and Iraq.
March 20, 2003: The United States launches war against Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime. Image source: Visual China
After several considerations, the fears eventually overwhelmed the excitement, and Iran decided to strike first. Since 2004, Tehran has supported Shiite militias in Iraq, including the initial Jaysh al-Mahdi, and the Allah Kata'ib Hezbollah and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, which rose up after 2006. When the United States officially announced its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Iran's influence in Iraq had reached a new high in modern times.
Iranian President Lehi met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Al-Hussein. Image source: Visual China
After 2014, the "Islamic State" began to wreak havoc at the turn of Syria and Iraq, and Iran seized this strategic opportunity to actively expand its military influence. First, Iran has united its own armed groups that it supports and trains in Iraq to form the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) to carry out counterterrorism missions with the Iraqi army. Second, the forces of iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force entered Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government to assist the Iraqi army in fighting the Islamic State.
At the end of 2017, the "Islamic State" regime collapsed under the siege of all parties, but Iran's military presence has been rooted in Iraq, and some armed groups have formed the "Fatah Alliance" in 2018 to participate in the national election, and as mentioned above, it won 48 seats, which was the second largest faction in the parliament that year.
But just in May 2018, Trump launched "maximum pressure" on Iran, not only unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015, but also imposing sanctions on Iranian-backed Iraqi militia leaders.
Since 2019, the confrontation between U.S. troops in Iraq and pro-Iranian militias has intensified, the former began to attack the latter's positions, the latter will also return to color, and the conflict between the two sides will be white-hot on January 3, 2020: the US drone launched an air strike at Baghdad airport, successfully killing the Commander of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force Sulaimani, and the deputy commander Muhandis.
Although Iran has since launched a counterattack against the US military base, but the situation is stronger than the people, Tehran can only grit its teeth and vow to "drive the US troops out of Iraq", in fact, while carrying out a harassment war with the US military to shoot rockets at each other, while secretly expecting the US troops to withdraw from Iraq almost all like the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
However, judging from the results, although the number of US troops in Iraq continues to decrease, it has not been completely withdrawn, according to the January 2021 data, the number of US troops in Iraq has been reduced from more than 5,000 to about 2,500, but at the same time, NATO has increased the number of troops in Iraq from 500 to 4,000 at the request of the Iraqi government. In the short term, it should be quite difficult for Iran to completely eliminate other armed forces in Iraq.
In addition, Iran is also facing a surge of public opinion within Iraq. Since 2003, the reason why Iran has been regarded by many Iraqis as a messenger of justice is because the US military that launched the war has assumed the evil image of an "invader", and the notoriety of the "Islamic State" has made Iran involved in anti-terrorism operations wear a moral aura. However, in the time and space of the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and the fall of the "Islamic State", Iran has gradually become a "new invader" occupying Iraq, and there are two key reasons.
First, some Iranian-backed militias, believing themselves to be free from Iraqi law and under the control of the Iraqi government, have begun to engage in political, economic and security tyranny, not only participating in opaque or illegal economic activities, but also setting up checkpoints to collect taxes, opening construction companies to force projects, interfering in the operation of seaports, and even being accused of committing numerous assassinations against anti-Iranian politicians.
Second, the above-mentioned acts have not only made the Iraqi government sit on a needle and felt, but also disgusted many people. However, the latter, seeing that the government is doing nothing and allowing the militia to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs, will naturally resent Iran even more, thus forming a strong anti-Iranian public opinion base.
In 2019, a nationwide demonstration broke out in Iraq, and although the core of the people's resistance was governance issues such as low wages, public service incompetence, nepotism, and rampant corruption, it also had strong nationalist overtones, shouting anti-American slogans and shouting angrily at Iran's intervention in Iraq; Iran's consulates in Najaf and Karbala, Iraq, have even been besieged and attacked by people, both of which are mostly Shiites and have traditionally been important towns with close ties with Iran, but iran has been set on fire by people to burn the outer walls of the consulates.
What has caused Iran even more headache is the alienation of traditional pro-Iranian political leaders such as Sadr. Looking back, Sadr came from a family of Shiite religious leaders, and originally had a natural ideological affinity for Iran, and after the US invasion in 2003, he also led the Iranian-backed "Mahdi Army" (now sadr's own armed forces) to fight against the United States; However, after the gradual withdrawal of US troops, Sadr was keenly aware of the rising "anti-Iranian intervention" public opinion in Iraq, so he gradually drifted away from Iran and began to portray himself as an "Iraqi nationalist" who was strongly anti-American and anti-Iranian. After the assassination of Suleimani, Sadr was even more unscrupulous and repeatedly publicly criticized Iran's interference in Iraq's internal affairs.
Sadr is not alone in trying to distance himself from Iran. Iraq's current caretaker Prime Minister, Al-Qadimi, despite Iran's support, has tried to develop relations with the Gulf states and even publicly stated that Iraq should maintain good interaction with the United States, with the aim of self-evident: to balance Iran's growing interference. At the same time, Al-Qadimi has taken a number of measures to limit the power of the "Popular Mobilization Forces", which is also supported by former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, who has close ties to Iran.
Prime Minister of Iraq: If the complex political situation in the country continues, he will resign as prime minister. Image source: Visual China
In short, in view of the changing perception of Iran's role among the Iraqi people, in today's Iraqi society, being close to Iran is no longer a completely positive political asset, and the traditional pro-Iranian political elite must also correct its own position in response to changes in public opinion.
Among them, Sadr went the farthest, directly on the opposite side of Iran, and Kadimi and Maliki were more fine-tuned. The direct result of this correction is that the Shiite camp, which is the majority in Iraqi politics, has been divided, making it difficult to form a politically unified force.
Looking closely at Sadr's support for the masses, Shiiteism and opposition to Iranian interference can be described as two major indicators; In addition, Sadr also cooperated with the Iraqi Communist Party to shout slogans such as improving the economy and opposing corruption, so it also attracted the support of a large number of people at the bottom, making it the largest force in Iraqi politics today.
However, the rest of the Shiite camp may not be willing to completely break with Iran, and the "Fatah alliance" is directly supported by Iran, and even if it is hit hard in this election and is not as powerful as in the past, it can still win a certain number of seats. Therefore, in the short term, it is difficult for Iraqi Shiites to return to the unified posture of the past.
From Iran's point of view, it is unlikely that it will give up political and military intervention in Iraq. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war has led to the recognition that Iraq poses a potential threat to Iran if it is strong and dominated by nationalist or pan-Arab forces. Therefore, even if it is difficult to fully dominate the Iraqi government, it is impossible to give up using the Shiite "strategic fulcrum" to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs.
Iraq also plays an important role in Iran's regional strategy. Geographically, Iraq is Iran's "land bridge" to Syria and Lebanon, and after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Iranian-backed militias have taken advantage of this geographical advantage to frequently travel between the three countries.
If Iran is to continue to advance the Shia Crescent strategy, the first step is to ensure the smooth flow of Iraq, especially to avoid Iraq being controlled by the United States and its Middle East allies.
Judging from the results, under Iran's long-term layout, it has not been able to play a role in the Iraqi economic market, but Iran's military and political presence has really played a certain role in controlling the Iraqi government's position. However, in the face of the mood of the Iraqi people and the demand for a more independent government, iran's challenge may become increasingly heavy.
First, the Iraqi political elite seems to want to maintain strategic relations with the United States, rather than, as Iran has stated, to withdraw all U.S. troops; Second, the Iraqi government also welcomes Turkey and Saudi Arabia to balance Iran's dominant existence, Saudi Arabia and Iran's long-term competition is self-evident, Turkey has repeatedly attacked Kurdish armed forces in northern Iraq, which has plunged Tehran into geopolitical anxiety: Does Erdogan intend to copy the Syrian model in Iraq and establish a security buffer zone controlled by Turkey?
Returning to Iraq itself, there are now two dimensions of competition on its territory: First, Iran and the United States and its regional rivals are engaged in a geopolitical game in Iraq; Second, the confrontation between pro-Iranian and anti-Iranian forces in the political arena has gradually become white-hot, and has led to political stalemate and bloody conflicts.
Although Kadimi and others want to balance diplomatic relations and establish a stable central government, these two layers of competition have led to expectations becoming illusions. At present, although Sadr is calling for another general election, the split situation of the Shiite camp will not recover in the short term, and Iran is even less likely to withdraw from Iraq, so in the foreseeable future, the political impasse and the pro-Iranian confrontation against Iran will be repeated in Iraq.
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