Ayatollah Sistani and the Iraqi elections

The original Bush plan was to install a puppet regime with the Americans holding the leash while a constitution was being written by a couple of policy wonks over at AEI and their best Iraqi pal, Ahmed "Hero in Error" Chalabi. But the Ayatollah quashed that without firing a shot: instead, he fired off a fatwa – the Muslim equivalent of a papal encyclical – that condemned the American plan as "fundamentally unacceptable" and demanded that the writing of Iraq's constitution be turned over to an elected assembly of Iraqis.

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Having gotten his way, Sistani then set about cobbling together a pro-Shi'ite list of candidates, one that even included such ostensibly secular figures as Chalabi and some Sadrists, as well as the mainstream Shi'ite parties, SCIRI and Dawa. Sunday's election will mark the triumph of the Ayatollah's vision: all indications point to a victory for the Sistani list, made all the more overwhelming by a Sunni participation rate that looks (as of this moment: 2:52 PST on Sunday) to be somewhere very close to single digits.

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Sistani made it a religious duty to vote, but didn't do so himself because he's a citizen of Iran, having been born there, in the holy city of Mashad in 1930. More than once during the campaign, Iyad Allawi's National Accord party denounced the Sistani-approved coalition as "the Iranian list," with Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan practically issuing a declaration of war as he pronounced Tehran the "most dangerous enemy of Iraq." Not Zarqawi, not the Ba'athists, but Iran – that's the big danger, and President Bush seemed to echo (or is it the other way around?) this fear of Iranian interference in the days leading up to the election.

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The top candidate on Sistani's list is the former leader of the military wing of the SCIRI, the leading fundamentalist Shi'ite party that was headquartered in Tehran during Saddam's reign. He was armed and succored by the Iranian government for all those years, and there is no reason to believe that the relationship has ended, only that it is a little more discreet. The Dawa party has a similar history: given shelter by the Iranians during the years of Ba'athist rule, these groups never accepted American aid or direction and refused to gather under the Chalabi-led umbrella group of Iraqi exiles.

The bizarre aspect of all this is that it now looks like Chalabi was an Iranian agent all along, and is going to pop up as a high official in the new government, perhaps interior minister or even president.

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Although results are not in, and won't be for at least 24 hours, preliminary figures indicate a turnout of anywhere from half to 60 percent of registered voters, especially heavy in Shi'ite and Kurdish regions. The voter registration list consisted of nearly 14 million names in the food-ration public-distribution database, and the implication that if you didn't vote you didn't get your ration card renewed was less than subtle. As Khalid, a young Iraqi blogger, related:

"[T]he way the voting happened, is that you go to the voting center, and you go to the man that is your ration dealer, the one that you take the ration from him every month, so you tell him that you are gonna vote, he marks your name on his list, and then you vote!!!
that way the goverment will know exactly who voted and who didnt, two dealers said that the next years' card won't be given to those who didnt vote.."

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(I wonder about the relatively large number of absentee votes from Iran, as opposed to the U.S., England, and Australia, as shown in this graph.)

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I wouldn't be surprised if Allawi is marginalized by these elections and the U.S. puts its chips on their old partner-in-crime, Ahmed Chalabi. American officials are already starting to "reach out" to Chalabi, as New York Times reporter Judith Miller put it on MSNBC's Hardball, offering him all sorts of plum positions in the new Iraqi Cabinet.
  Justin Raimondo article

Chalabi, for Crissakes!

There is a tragic nobility in the determination of so many Iraqis to defy threats of terrorism and bravely show up to cast their votes, clearly and visibly inspired by Western ideals and the desire to live normal, decent lives in spite of everything. The tragedy is that they are being manipulated by cynical politicians and their foreign paymasters, who are conspiring to dismantle the Iraqi nation – and with the fragments kindle another war.