The choice of Ibrahim Jaafari as candidate for prime minister of the majority United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) is seen as an important advance for the more pragmatic forces in the administration of President George W. Bush against their adversaries among the neoconservatives and other hawks.
Jaafari, who won the UIA’s nod after the withdrawal of his only remaining rival and neoconservative favorite, Ahmed Chalabi, was seen as the most unifying candidate who, unlike Chalabi in particular, has consistently enjoyed the highest public approval ratings in Iraq of any major politician.
He is also seen as the most eager of the religious Shi’ite candidates to reach out to the Sunni community in hopes of achieving a political settlement to the still raging insurgency.
"It is certainly true that Jaafari has a rhetoric of inclusion that stretches even to the people of Fallujah, whereas Chalabi wanted to punish all the Sunni Arabs who had had anything to do with the Ba’ath Party," noted University of Michigan Middle East historian Juan Cole.
This appears to accord well with the growing sentiment within the officer corps of the U.S. military in Iraq, who have come to believe that there is no military solution to the mainly Sunni insurgency, and that both Washington and the new Iraqi government must try harder to drive a wedge between "nationalist" and "Islamist" insurgents by providing political incentives to the former.
That message was underlined by the Time magazine report over the weekend that U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers have recently been in direct, albeit unofficial, contact with "former regime elements" in the insurgency for several months and that at least two meetings between U.S. military officers and one insurgent chief have been held recently.
"Any deal with the insurgents would be up to the new government, but embassy officials say they believe that reaching an accord should be the new government’s top priority," according to Time reporter Michael Ware. "Behind the scenes, the U.S. is encouraging Sunni leaders and the insurgents to talk with the government."
Despite working closely with Washington in the run-up to the war, and in both the postwar Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the interim government headed by President Iyad Allawi, Jaafari, a leader of the Dawa (or Islamic Call) Party, has managed to maintain a greater independence than other former exiles.
Jaafari, 55, worked as a doctor in Iraq until 1980 when he, like many other leaders of his party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), fled to Iran. He lived there for 10 years before moving to London, where he lived until the March 2003 invasion.
Jaafari’s relative popularity is explained by a number of factors, according to recent analyses, including his having lived in Iraq longer than any of his rival exiles.
These include Chalabi, who left when he was still a young teenager, SCIRI’s Adil Abdel-Mahdi, whose free-market liberalism endeared him to some sectors in the Bush administration, and Allawi, who formed his own list which captured only about 14 percent of the vote, compared to the UIA’s nearly 50 percent. Like Dawa, SCIRI participated in the UIA.
Unlike the other three major candidates, Jaafari’s family was not part of the upper-class Shi’ite families from Baghdad, but rather led a middle-class life in Karbala. Also considered personally the most religious of the other candidates, he has not hesitated to point out that his wife is also a doctor.
"She goes to the hospital and cuts open people’s abdomens," he told the Boston Globe last week. "How could I support a law that says she can’t drive a car? It’s not logical."
Nonetheless, Dawa insists that Iraq’s constitution, which must now be drafted by the new national assembly, be based primarily if not exclusively on Islamic law, a point about which both the Kurds and secular Arabs are particularly concerned. He has also said that no laws should be passed "that contradict Islam."
Still, Jaafari is seen as the religious Shi’ite leader most inclined to reach out to both parties.
"I wouldn’t say he’s secular, or religious either," Tony Dodge, a British expert on Iraq, told the Christian Science Monitor. He also noted that Dawa appears more indigenous to Iraqis than SCIRI, which is more closely identified with the Islamic Republic in Teheran.
But it is the perception of his independence from the U.S., and particularly the harsher features of the occupation, that may make him the most credible politician, not only to his co-religionists in the Shia community, which, according to recent polls, has become increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. presence despite its election performance, but to other key sectors, including the Sunnis, whose boycott of the Jan. 30 election was more effective than had been predicted.
In an interview with United Press International (UPI) last August, Jaafari made clear that he did not approve of the last April’s assault by U.S. Marines on Fallujah, which, until a second campaign last November, was the main stronghold of both the Islamist and Sunni insurgents.
"I believe that it is necessary to deal politically with what is happening in Fallujah because it is the best solution to end military confrontation and avoid its dangerous consequences," he said.
"If we fail in the first attempt, we should try a second and a third time until we achieve the aspired results based on our keenness to establish a new Iraq free of violence and which confronts violence with political solutions."
He similarly objected publicly to the U.S. campaign against Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr’s militia in Najaf last August.
"New Iraq should be politically motivated and capable of accepting the other, by using all means except the military option," he said. "We might face military challenges in certain times, but it is important that resorting to weapons be the exception and not the rule."
This emphasis on political means to deal with insurgents is deeply frustrating to the neoconservatives and other hawks in the administration, who hailed the virtual leveling of Najaf and later Fallujah as decisive victories over the insurgents and object lessons for those who would challenge the U.S., not just in Iraq but throughout the region.
U.S. military commanders and intelligence agencies on the ground, however, were less sanguine, noting privately that they may have succeeded only in dispersing the rebels and moving Iraq closer to civil war. That assessment appears to have been behind the recent contacts.
"Sunnis are an integral portion of Iraqis, and we will include them in discussions," Jaafari said after his nomination was announced Tuesday.
That’s also what the pragmatists in the State Department and the U.S. military appear to be doing.
(Inter Press Service)
