Some Iraqi Sunni political projects

Too busy to post at any great length, but I wanted to draw attention to two recent articulations of a political program by important Iraqi Sunnis.   

First, Tareq al-Hashemi (head of the Islamic Iraqi Party and for now still Vice President) offered a political program aimed at overcoming the current political stalemate (fun fact:  Aswat al-Iraq tells you how many people have read each story, and I was the first person to read this one - yay, me).   Hashemi, who has been making the rounds of Sunni areas over the last few weeks to meet with tribal and local leaders, put forward his new political program in a press conference today (Wednesday).   It's significant because Hashemi is the highest ranking Sunni in the Iraqi government, and has been at the center of the crisis facing Maliki's government.  He's also probably the single Sunni leader most invested in the current political process, and therefore a key to any hopes of a formal political reconciliation (although for the same reason he takes a lot of abuse from insurgency factions for his "collaboration" with the Maliki government, and has to work hard to prove himself with Sunni audiences). 

The program calls for "united federal Iraq" which respects the legitimacy of the national resistance (al-muqawima al-wataniya) against the occupation. According to the article, Hashemi called for a concerted effort to reach a new consensus among Iraqis and to overcome the growing mutual mistrust and fear which has paralyzed the country's politics.   Overcoming violence, he argued, requires first uniting the vision of the fundamental questions about the country's future:  no military solution without a political reconciliation, in other words.   He called for moving these discussions out of the closed rooms where they are being considered and involving the country's people in a real public debate - and for making it an authentically Iraqi agreement without foreign intervention (he left unspecified, as near as I can tell, whether this meant either/both Iran or/and the United States).   

He then offered a 25 point program around which he hoped to achieve a national consensus, including:  Iraqis are equal as citizens before the law with no discrimination based on religion or sect or origin or political membership;  shedding Iraqi blood should be considered forbidden;  extremism such as takfir should be condemned and combatted;  legitimacy should flow from the ballot box and there should be no acceptance of coups or despotism; and recognizing the special status of the Kurdish region.   It demanded that the armed forces be the property of all Iraqis, not of one party or sect, and rejected all militias or armed groups outside the context of the national state.  Finally, while condemning "terrorism" it endorsed the legitimacy of "resistance to the occupation".   This seems like as close to the state of play in national-level Iraqi Sunni politics as you're likely to get, so it will be interested to see if it generates any movement.  Supposedly it has been circulated to other political groupings, but no word as of yet about any response.

The other intervention comes from Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Qissi, spokesman for the Reform and Jihad Front, whose interview with the Yaqin News Agency has been posted on the al-Buraq forum (and probably others) but does not yet appear on the RJF's own site.  The Reform and Jihad Front, you might recall, is one of several efforts by the insurgency factions (including the Islamic Army of Iraq and the Mujahideen Army) to form a united political leadership - and therefore might be considered "state of play" for the "nationalist-jihadist" insurgency factions.   

Qissi made a number of familiar points:  the primary goal is to drive the occupation out of Iraq, a jihad which would never be abandoned no matter its price.     He claimed that the jihadist factions were the only legitimate representatives of the (Sunni) Iraqi people, but they reject and will seek to abort any political process which gives legitimacy to the occupation or helps it to achieve its goals and reject the legitimacy of a constitution devised under occupation.   He specifically rejected any Iranian intervention in Iraqi affairs.  As for a positive political project, he mostly talked about Islam and sharia.  He demanded a unified Iraq while nodding towards Kurdish distinctiveness. In what I take to be an interesting innovation (it is bolded in the text), he said that one of the RJF's most important goals is to reject any discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin or sect, which could be a (fairly weak) attempt to reach out to Shia.   

He didn't offer a totally rosy picture of the insurgency, however.  He acknowledged that the resistance had not been able to protect the Sunnis of Baghdad as they would have liked, attributing this to the US construction of walls and security operations which favored the Shia militias and hindered their ability to protect Sunnis.  He also acknowledged that some factions had worked with the occupation, a decision he regretted but which he hoped would be changed as they saw the light and realized their mistake.  The overall tone of the interview was defiant but not exuberant, at least as I read it. 

Once again, I'm just throwing these out for people to chew over, not really offering any arguments one way or the other about their significance at this point.   As always, I think that what Iraqi figures are saying to their own people should be taken into account at least as much as what they say in English to American journalists, even if both are useful bits of information in their own way.  Make of them what you will.

One last thing: I wanted to be sure to link to Nir Rosen's latest outstanding dispatch, this one focusing on the Iraqi refugees. 

Morning update:  did I really start a post by saying "too busy to post at any great length" and then proceed to write a 1000 word post?  I think I need more, or less, coffee. 

More importantly, Tareq al-Hashemi has reportedly said that Ali Sistani welcomed his initiative, which would be something of a big deal even if Sistani's influence doesn't seem to be what it once was.

Comments

[Vermando]

Aardvark,

Love your work. I have a question for you, which I pose to you because you are the only scholar whom I can think of who really follows this closely.

Are Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib really great recruiting tools for the Jihadis, and in your opinion, would shutting down Gitmo hurt their recruiting?

Apologies for posting a question in this way but do not know who / how else to ask. Many thanks and again many compliments on the fine work.

[Andrew R.]

Here's a question for you, Marc. What exactly *would* it take for Sadr as well as Dawa and SIIC to reach a "we promise to stop killing you execution-style in the middle of the night if you accept that al-Douri is never returning to power" style agreement? Because at the moment, Dawa and SIIC seem (to me, who knows beans about the internal politics) to be willing to give everyone else a collective "F**k you!" as long sa they've got both the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran in their corner.

[Gregory Gause]

Of course, these days getting an endorsement from al-Sistani could be a one-way ticket to the morgue.