Iraq gets final election results

ISN SECURITY WATCH (21/01/06) – Iraqis have moved a step closer toward assembling a viable government, with officials announcing the long-awaited results of December parliamentary elections, in which Shi’ite parties predictably won the most seats.

According to final results released on Friday, while Shi’ite-based parties took the most seats, they fell short of the two-thirds needed to form a ruling government on their own.

The shortcoming of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) - which won 128 of 275 seats in the Council of Representatives, formerly known as the National Assembly - means the Shi’ite parties will have to form a coalition government.

Sunni Muslim parties, meanwhile, won 55 seats, a boon for the minority sect in Iraq that boycotted the January 2005 transitional government elections and spent the last year without an official stake in Iraq’s political future.

The results also showed that the Kurdish Alliance took a loss in the election, going from 75 seats in the transitional government to 53 seats in the new council.

Elected lawmakers will serve a four-year term and are expected to take office later this month.

Without a majority, the Shi’ites will likely turn to their coalition partners in the transitional government, the Kurdish Alliance, as well as the Sunni parties, in hope of cobbling together an all-inclusive government in a country deeply fractured along religious and ethnic lines.

“We in the UIA and Kurdish slates can make a quorum, yet we do not want to dominate the rule,” news agencies quoted Abbas al-Bayati, head of the Islamic Turkomen Party, a member of the UIA, as saying. “We are ready to negotiate with all slates without exception or preference.”

Many analysts have stressed the importance of power sharing in Iraq so as to avoid an outbreak of civil war once US forces withdraw from the country. But it will be up to the majority Shi’ite parties to pave the way for such a government, noted Omer Taspinar, a Middle East analyst with the Brookings Institution.

“If the Shi’ites want to run the country, they have to form a coalition with either the Sunni or the Kurds, preferably both,” Taspinar told ISN Security Watch.

Meanwhile, others noted that the George Bush administration was likely “disappointed” with Friday’s results, as religious rather than secular parties had dominated the election.

“The Bush administration has longed hoped the secular parties would do much better […] it just hasn’t worked out that way,” Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Libertarian Cato Institute, told ISN Security Watch. “It is what it is: the expressed will of the Iraqi people.”

Perle is among a growing list of US proponents of a pullout of US forces within the next year. According to a recent poll, nearly six out ten US citizens want an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

However, Perle acknowledged the hazards of such a move to Iraq’s fledgling government, namely civil war. Officials in the Bush administration have also warned of the possibility of ethnic and religious civil war among Iraqi’s if US troops were to pull out now.

“Once the US leaves, then we will see […] if the Iraqis go to civil or share the power,” said Perle.

Recent reports show there are already growing tensions among Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaida fighters in the region over the death of innocent Iraqis in al-Qaida attacks on US and coalition forces.

A withdrawal now, warned Taspinar, would “provide a framework in which al-aid and other anti American terrorists can operate with impunity”.

But with the announcement of the election results, the time is right for the US to announce a proposal for its withdrawal from Iraq, he opined. “A timeline [for withdrawal] would let this new Iraqi government know exactly when their responsibilities really begin.”
(By Carmen Gentile, senior international correspondent)