by Michael J. Totten
“If corrupt (officials) and quotas remain,” Sadr declared, “the entire government will be brought down and no one will be exempt.” In other words, drain the swamp.
The
worldwide populist revolt toppling conventional politicians in the
United States, Europe and even the Philippines has now reached Iraq.
Most Westerners still following Iraqi politics assumed that incumbent
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Victory coalition would handily win the
parliamentary election, but nope. Abadi's coalition came in third.
Firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Sairun coalition came in first.
You
remember Moqtada al-Sadr. He’s the guy who mounted an Iranian-backed
Shia insurgency against the United States, the Iraqi government and his
Sunni civilian neighbors between 2003 and 2008. He’s a very different
person today. He still raises and shakes his fist in the air but today
he’s shaking it at crooked elites, and he’s shaking it at his former
Iranian patrons.
“If corrupt (officials) and quotas remain,” Sadr declared, “the entire government will be brought down and no one will be exempt.” In other words, drain the swamp.
He’s
Iraq’s version of the rabble-rousing populist: fundamentalist,
anti-establishment and anti-foreigner. A champion of the working class
and a declared enemy of liberal Western ideas. His list even included
Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the colorful journalist who famously threw a shoe at President George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad in 2008.
He
would of course be nowhere without the Westerners he despises.
Americans, after all, cleared Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian Baath Party
regime out of the way and established the election system that put him
on top. He’d also be nowhere without Iran. His former allies in the
Islamic Republic next door armed his Mahdi Army militia and gave him
refuge when the Americans were coming to get him.
Now
that the United States is (mostly) gone from Iraq, and now that Iran
has been mucking around in Iraqi politics to disastrous effect for more
than a decade, Sadr has become as anti-Iranian as he is anti-American.
He’s not at all happy with a foreign capital using his government as a
hand-puppet, whether that foreign capital is Washington, DC, or Tehran.
No
need for surprise here. Many in Iraq’s large Shia majority feel a
natural kinship with the even larger Shia majority in Iran, but ethnic
tension between Arabs and Persians has been a feature of Middle Eastern
geopolitics for as long as Arabs and Persians have inhabited the region,
and nationalist tension between Iran and Iraq has been present
throughout Iraq’s entire (albeit brief) history as a modern
nation-state. Shia Iraqis and Shia Iranians are natural allies, but at
the same time, Arab Iraqis and Persian Iranians are natural enemies.
Sadr
is painfully reactionary and more than a little bit dangerous. He’s
also complicated. He is a Shia sectarian whose militia brutally
“cleansed” Sunnis from neighborhoods in and around Baghdad but he’s also
what passes today for an Iraqi nationalist, disavowing violence against
all Iraqis and opposing all foreign influence. “We won’t allow the
Iraqis to be cannon fodder for the wars of others nor be used in proxy
wars outside Iraq,” says Sadrist movement member Jumah Bahadily of the Syrian civil war.
He
also forged an alliance with communists—a horrifying ideological
cocktail from the point of view of any liberal-minded Westerner, but
alas there are few Jeffersonian democrats in old Mesopotamia. There are
however, some secular reformists and technocrats, and they also formed
an alliance with the Sadrists. Tehran has taken notice and isn’t happy
about it. “We will not allow liberals and communists to govern in
Iraq,” says Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Iranian ruler Ayatollah Khamenei.
Precious
few Americans would enjoy living under a government run by Sadrists.
Even so, his pushback against Iran is nothing to sniff at. Westerners
and Arabs alike have bemoaned Iran’s rising influence in Iraq after the
overthrow of Saddam, thanks in large part to Sadr’s own Mahdi Army, yet
no one is resisting Iranian influence in Iraq as successfully right now
as he is. Sure, the Sunni parties are pushing back as they always do,
but the Sunnis are a small minority. Nearly all Iranian influence in
Iraq comes through the Shias. Only they can successfully resist Tehran
because they’re the only ones who can enable Tehran in the first place.
With Sadr’s movement in the saddle, Iran faces the most formidable
obstacle in Baghdad since Saddam flitted from palace to palace.
Sadr
will not be Iraq’s next prime minister. His list won the most votes but
he himself did not stand for election. He could be the next kingmaker,
so to speak, but even that’s not guaranteed. While his party won more
seats than the others, it did not win the majority. It’s still possible
that the others will unite in a coalition against him. Nobody knows yet.
Whatever
ends up happening, the main takeaway here ought to be this: Iraq isn’t
even in the same time zone as high-functioning liberal democracies like
New Zealand and France, but we can parse the result and guess at the
ultimate outcome of its fourth consecutive election as if it were.
Michael J. Totten is a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum
Source: https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/the-populist-revolt-reaches-iraq
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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