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According to the Times, Sadr has a creative way to demonstrate that he’s the real boss of the Iraqi parliament: his people are going to hold a popular referendum for who should be the next prime minister now that Maliki’s bloc has 89 seats and Allawi’s has 91. The referendum has absolutely no legal force.
But I’m inclined to say it doesn’t matter. The next largest parliamentary bloc is the former Shiite powerhouse known as the Iraqi National Alliance with 70 seats. The Sadrists have at least 40 of those. It’s a safe assumption that the vast majority of whomever’s going to vote in this wacky referendum are going to be Shiites. Actually, what am I saying — the actual “referendum” is surely just a pretext for Sadr to claim a popular mandate for directing the INA to enter into a coalition with either Maliki or Allawi. The INA’s 70 seats — or even just the Sadrists’ 40 — will put either Maliki or Allawi on a glide path to the 163 necessary to form the next government.
And naturally Sadr will look like the biggest boss of them all, forcing his two former enemies to come groveling to him, knowledgeable that if they ever try and fuck with him during the next government, Sadr will lay them low.
Maliki and Allawi look like absolute idiots right now. Their politics — non-sectarian strongman-ism — contain vastly more similarities and differences, and those politics, taken together, commanded 180 parliamentary seats, an actual majority. If they had found a way to bandwagon together, the 40 Sadrist seats would be — well, not meaningless, but nowhere near as potent as they are now. Right now, they’re looking like the decisive factor in the election.
I know I’ve harped on this for years, but in fall 2003, Moqtada al-Sadr declared an interim government and no one gave a shit. He flew a flag and no one saluted. Through a stunning combination of his own savvy and his opponents’ miscalculations — only the faces of those opponents change — he keeps coming back more powerful than the last time someone proclaimed him to be finished. You do not mess with the son of Muhammed Sadeq al-Sadr.
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Heavy. Comeback Kid in the Land of the Two Rivers.
If you think there’s a real chance Allawi will form a governing coalition with the support of the Sadrists, I have some Golden State Warriors playoff tickets you might be interested in buying.
The only issue at stake in the current jockeying is whether the best-acronym-ever SOL and the INA unite with Maliki still in the PM slot, or behind someone else (assuming they can agree on someone, which won’t be easy). My guess is that ultimately Ayatollah Sistani will have to make the call, either leaning on Maliki to step aside (as Jaafari ultimately did) or on Sadr to accept Maliki.
That Sadr is dithering and using this “referendum” rather than staking out his own position in the negotiations strikes me as a sign of weakness, not strength.
P.S. The reason Maliki and Allawi can’t “bandwagon together” is that the primary tenet of the Maliki regime (and the UIA/Kurdish alliance that gave birth to it) was stripping Baathists of anything resembling power or influence, so that there couldn’t be a coup. Allawi’s electoral coalition formed behind the desire to restore some of that influence.
There’s no middle ground to be had there. You’d have better luck arguing that Joe Lieberman and Jane Hamsher should develop a common platform. :-)
The fat kid has staying power.