Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Iraq: A Return To The 'Natural State'

By Siddhartha Mahanta  

Samir Sumaida’ie

Iraqi ambassador to U.S.

Iraq's March 7 elections were only the first phase in a complex, potentially long and drawn-out battle to form a government. With neither major candidate -- former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and current Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki -- picking up enough seats to form a majority, each finds himself waging the war of promises and compromises to grab the 163 required seats to claim his seat as prime minister.

It remains to be seen if the sectarian division that has driven the narrative of Iraq after Saddam Hussein will continue to play a key role in the country's democratic evolution. Sectarianism, says Ambassador Samir Sumaida'ie, is not native to Iraq. Governing institutions will take hold, he adds, because Iraqis are ready for them.

NationalJournal.com spoke with the ambassador about his country's successes and the considerable challenges that lie ahead. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: Some say Maliki will do whatever it takes to secure the number of seats necessary to hold on to power. That could include further disqualifying candidates on Allawi's Iraqiya list. To what extent does he have to strike a balance between being the strong man and holding on to power? Do Iraqis trust that he will allow the process to take hold?

Sumaida'ie: Gaining power is a major, major issue. It's an important goal, there is a lot at stake, and people will do everything they can in order to achieve that. The key question here... is whether the means are legal and peaceful. Even in other democracies, there are many legal challenges which are mounted when the ultimate prize is in question. We've seen them here in the United States over and over again. So it is not out of the question to see them in Iraq, even more sharply in our condition. But that is the key question. Do people stick to the process of law? Or do they take them to the streets and start to initiate violence? That is what everybody has to watch out for. Anything which is legal and nonviolent is perfectly to be expected.

NJ: An open list of candidates allows for more identity politics and personal politics to come into play. This speaks to your notion that Iraqi politics and Iraqis in general are not sectarian.

Sumaida'ie: Having an open list allows the voters to identify their favorite candidates, irrespective of the list on which they are, or the order on the list that they [are likely] to vote for. The ramifications of this are important. For candidates, it means that they have to pay attention to what pleases the electorate, not what pleases the party boss. Because in the closed list, the party boss decides the order on the list. Now they free themselves from that, and those who are perceived by the electorate to be good public servants... do better than those who huddle around their party bosses. This changes the dynamics....

Immediately after the removal of Saddam Hussein, what governed people was mutual fear: the traumas of the recent past, the questions of security and survival. And when security is threatened, people tend to gather around their families, and extended families, and tribes, and sects.... When the question of security subsides, people have the opportunity to think more in national terms about country as a whole. We have seen this process -- it's a slow process, it will probably take several more electoral cycles, maybe 10, 20 years, but that is the direction the people are going.... Iraq traditionally has been a broadly non-sectarian country. But it has been thrust into this by the extreme circumstances of the recent decades.

NJ: What will the legacy be of de-Baathification as far as rebuilding a technocratic class that is capable of managing, of really handling democratic institutions?

Sumaida'ie: I was a member of the Governing Council when the Committee for De-Baathification, as it was at that time, was formed. I was even invited to be a member of it. I declined. Later it became an institution. Now the tragedy is that this has become an instrument of politics rather than a judicial instrument. In my opinion, at that time and still now, we have to deal with this as a judicial issue, not as a political club to bludgeon people with -- this has been the case, unfortunately. And I think it is very important for Iraq to return this to the legal framework and remove it from the political battle space. Of course, there are people who benefit from using this as a political weapon, and they will resist that. But the country needs to deal with its past in a way that will not hinder its prospects for the future.

NJ: Who in Iraq is truly committed to democratization?

Sumaida'ie: The great majority of the people are now committed to this political process. Now, we had a fringe of the population aided and abetted by foreign forces, which believed that the entire political order... is totally unacceptable, and the way to change it is through violence. I think they have failed, miserably....

The political process is imperfect. It leaves a lot to be desired. It's frustrating for a lot of people, it's slow. It's not as effective as holding a gun to somebody's head and telling him he's got to do something. But that's the only way that is likely to ever work in Iraq. I would say there is now a consensus around this... the spectacle of millions of Iraqis defying all the threats and going to vote on Election Day was wonderful to behold. And I think that has put all the other alternative means to gaining power to one side, and that's the way Iraq is going.

NJ: Allawi's ability, as a secular Shiite, to make a place in his coalition for Sunnis strikes me as very significant -- the sense, as you're saying, that a different politics is taking hold. Can you speak to Allawi's ability to do that?

Sumaida'ie: About one-third of all city and town dwellers are mixed families. So we have a very integrated society.... Ayad Allawi presented himself as a national leader in a cross-sectarian program. And that has got him much better results than the elections before. We must remember also that the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, also presented himself as a national leader although his own political party, Al Dawa, is an Islamist party of the Shia persuasion. But he presented himself as a national leader, and he included, with him, some Sunni groups. Now everybody recognizes that this is the winning ticket -- the national banners attract votes. So this is a sign of the times, and we started noticing this in January 2009 in the provincial elections. And the writing was on the wall. Now we have confirmation of that.

NJ: I've read the union between the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and the Sadrists characterized as a marriage of different classes, of a lower-class group in the Sadrists and a middle-class group in ISCI. Does that kind of alliance have a future? Does it speak to the idea that the next round of politics isn't sectarian, but more class-based?

Sumaida'ie: It's always multilayered. All these political questions have layers of factors working.... I'm always amused by some observers here who try to reduce Iraq into this Sunni/Shia/Kurd triangle.... You're quite right in saying that the Sadrists have given voice to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the people who suffered severely under the previous regime. That's a fact. And they need to have a voice. And it's healthy that they're represented in parliament with such strength. It was not healthy when they were running the Mahdi Army....

How they choose to position themselves politically, that is part of the excitement of these coming few weeks, because there are several things pulling at them. There's the sectarian question, there's a national question, there's the class question, and their interests in raising the standard of living of their people.... Considering these, they will decide their own priorities and with whom they're going to form alliances. That will obviously be based on what the others have to offer to them -- as will be the case for all the other groups.

NJ: As someone who's spent a good deal of your life outside of Iraq, when you envisioned the day when democratic institutions would take hold, and this kind of process would be in place, is this how you saw things happening?

Sumaida'ie: I started this -- and this is a confession, if you like -- from a very a idealistic position, wishing the best for my country. Living abroad has taught me how things can be better.... I was hoping and expecting and thinking that once we removed the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, then we'd removed the major impediment to progress, and we just rush forward and start to build our country in the way that I envisaged it.

Well, that was rather naïve. When I went back to Iraq and I saw the extent of the damage in every sense -- not only the infrastructure, but even the social fabric. Relationships between people, norms, even manners. Everything had changed. Criminality, propensity to violence. Baghdad, my city, was a strange city to me. It had been ruined. Now, to repair all that, I realized very quickly, would take a long time. To get Iraq back to even the norms that were prevalent in the '50s... would take some time. But after facing these realities and dealing with them, I am now very encouraged that we are moving in the right direction. That's important because in 2006-2007, we were moving in the wrong direction.

NJ: It sounds like your attitude is that democracy has a real shot of jelling with pre-existing Iraqi governing traditions.

Sumaida'ie: I believe so. Iraq is not like some countries -- like, for example, Libya or Yemen -- where the population is almost totally homogenous. Iraq, for millennia, has been the melting pot of different nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, sects -- Iraq has never, ever, in its long history... been a homogenous country. So this is very much in the grain. Reverting back to its natural state is to be expected.