Did Religious Parties Really Lose the Iraqi Elections? Posted by Shadi Hamid

I'll be moderating a "conversation" with US Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill at the Brookings Doha Center tomorrow. In thinking about questions to ask him, I've been trying to get a better handle on the slowly solidifying perceptions of the March 7th results. And one of the post-election memes that's starting to irritate me is that Islamist parties were soundly defeated. This presumably signals a "new Iraq," one that is moving in a post-sectarian direction, with Iyad Allawi's "secular" coalition its new face. Well, while this rather convenient theme isn't necessarily 100% incorrect, it's kind of misleading.

First of all, it's slightly odd to call Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition "secularist," considering one of the leading coalition figures, Tareq al Hashemi, is an Islamist and, until recently, led the Iraqi Islamic Party, effectively the political arm of the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood.

That quibble aside, all you have to do is exert some effort and count up the seats to find that Islamists did pretty damn well (alth. The State of Law coalition, led by Maliki's Islamist Dawa Party, won 89 seats. The Iraqi National Alliance (INA), led by the very Islamist Sadrists and very Islamist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), won around 70 seats. If we add these together that pretty much comes out to 159 seats, which seems awfully close to the 163 seat threshold needed to form a government, something which, we can surmise, has not escaped Iran's notice. 

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I would like to say the religious parties are the bloc that includes the Sadrists and ISCI, which used to be Maliki’s bloc until he split from them (ISCI over his willingness to deal with the Sunnis, Sadrists over him rejecting them by attacking the Mahdi Army, as well as declaring any parties with militias illegal in 2008). ISCI and the Sadrists (Iran’s real proxies) got smoked, because Iraqis have a strong nationalist streak and hate Iran, despite what everyone has heard from our western press.Either Allawi or Maliki would have been acceptable to the US. As mentioned in the post, if Maliki accepts this decision w/o violence, this is an earlier-than-expected affirmation of Iraq’s real democracy. Fingers crossed...

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