Winners, losers and lost momentum

From the many arti­cles I read today (mostly on the west­ern media), all came to one con­clu­sion: Maliki is the win­ner, and the Kurds lost heav­ily with one pres­i­den­tial office.

In my opin­ion it is the other way around, Kurds gained enor­mously, and the future Maliki is weak and help­less Prime Min­is­ter, this is why:

The Kurds

First impres­sion, the Kurds didn’t achieve much except the pow­er­less office of the pres­i­dent, but look deeper and see what Barzani achieved.

Seen before as a tribal war­lord, Barzani emerged from the cri­sis as a new “promis­ing” leader, not only region­ally but even inter­na­tion­ally (NATO nom­i­nated Barzani for the peace prize). This is what Al-Quds Al-Arabi wrote today:

Kurds achieved a sig­nif­i­cant share of this eth­nic, sec­tar­ian ‘set­tle­ment’, they insisted on the ‘Kur­dish’ pres­i­dency, which will become a real­ity dif­fi­cult to change in the future as a legit­i­mate right constitutionally.

Mas­soud Barzani, who engi­neered this agree­ment was able to estab­lish his lead­er­ship, and suc­ceeded to remove his rival Tal­a­bani from Kur­dis­tan region, through to keep the cur­rent post as pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic of Iraq, show­ing polit­i­cal and diplo­matic skills to achieve a mir­a­cle of the agreement.

Here is Tal­a­bani admits:

I does not have any per­sonal desire or ambi­tion to become pres­i­dent … In the past two terms, Pres­i­dent Barzani is the one who nom­i­nated me for the Pres­i­dent office and now it is the same.

Maliki and the “State of Law”

The truth that must be said that Maliki acted as a states­man in a third world coun­try as Iraq he defended the inter­ests of his reli­gious com­mu­nity, and he rep­re­sented his “eth­nic group” and envi­ron­ment (these are the lead­er­ship require­ments, at least in the Mid­dle East).

Three months ago, Maliki’s chances of win­ning a sec­ond term vir­tu­ally doesn’t exist, but the unex­pected shift in the Sadrists posi­tion and then the Kurds approval raised the Prime Minister’s hopes again in the race towards the office.

But noth­ing for free, those who sup­ported Maliki, did not agree because they believed his hon­est inten­tions or his ide­o­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal or cul­tural devel­op­ment of his Dawa party, but accord­ing to the inter­ests of each bloc sep­a­rately. The the Kurds had asked him writ­ten guar­an­tees (and Allawi asked for writ­ten guar­an­tees also) because they do not believe his words.

The Sadrists, the Kurds, the Shi­ites, Maliki is obliged to pay the costs of his lead­er­ship and the inter­ests of the polit­i­cal blocs who brought him to power are very expensive.

How Al-Iraqiya lost?

Although the List was very close to win, but a strug­gle started within Al-Iraqiya List among those with a national project who want to over­come the eth­nic and the sec­tar­ian divi­sion, and those who belief that the new quo­tas divi­sion (muhas­sasa) means that the Sun­nis will leave the gov­ern­ment empty handed.

Al-Iraqiya’s biggest mis­take is that it lim­ited its options to reach the head the gov­ern­ment, and Allawi is the only can­di­date to fill this office, with­out offer­ing multi-candidate for dif­fer­ent posi­tions to vary its maneu­ver strategy.

Allawi with his self­ish­ness insist­ing that he is the only can­di­date for the office, Mut­laq with his para­noia after his removal by the De-Baathification Com­mis­sion wants to return to pol­i­tics at any cost.

Another prob­lem is the non-harmony among its lead­ers, this is what became clear dur­ing the past two weeks as var­ied opin­ions, ideas and visions sur­faced among Al-Iraqiya’s lead­ers, which weaken its options com­pared to three-four months ago.

Reach­ing an agree­ment for the time being, but there are still many unsolved issues and each issue is a new crisis:

For the Kurds Arti­cle 140 on Kirkuk, sat­isfy the Sunni polit­i­cal forces in order to par­tic­i­pate (and to con­tinue) in the gov­ern­ment, the role and the inter­ven­tions of neigh­bor­ing coun­tries, the sce­nar­ios after the final with­drawal of U.S. forces from Iraq next year, add to this the secu­rity and eco­nomic issues.

The talk about an Iraqi national project is only hot air in the bal­lot boxes for the future elec­tions in Iraq.