Patrick Ruffini, who is a whiz with interpreting election results has a fascinating map and electoral analysis of the Iraqi election results that comes to some interesting conclusions:
The two main parties in Iraq, the mainly-Shia United Iraqi Alliance, and the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan are ethnic parties — but they’re the most vanilla ethnic parties you could imagine. The Kurdish alliance is a fusion of two parties who once fought a civil war against each other. With the exception of Allawi’s Iraqi List, these coalitions pretty much include everyone of a particular ethnicity. This holds true even for the parties beyond the top three — for instance, President Al-Yawer’s coalition of Sunnis, which finished fourth at 1.78%, the Iraqi Turkmen Front coming in fifth, and the National Rafidain List, representing Assyrian Christians, which turned out a huge vote in U.S. overseas voting.
If the Shia coalition is so illiberal and pro-Iran, why then did it relatively well among Iraqi-Americans who have known democracy most of their lives — and where, coincidentally, Prime Minister Allawi’s bloc fared poorly (4.23%)? In the U.S., the Shia list narrowly edged the Assyrian Christian bloc 31.7% to 28.8%, with the Kurds taking 16.9%. The ethnic parties dominated, moreso than even in Iraq.
The political situation in Iraq seems much more stable than previously thought. The Shi’ite bloc seems to have little interest in an Iranian-style theocracy, and the tradition of the Najaf school is vastly different than the Iranian Qom school. Iraqi Shi’ites interpreting Islam as mandating theocracy would be like Lutherans accepting transubstantiation — they would be ignoring their own religious heritage.
Instead what we see is that Iraq has a chance at forging a relatively stable parliamentary system in which the Sunnis play a key role despite their minority status. Allawi’s secularists have a chance to play kingmaker between the Shi’ite and Kurdish coalitions, which will ensure that no one side is able to completely steamroll the other.
I agree the election results do show signs of potential compromise, provided some sort of Sunnis can be brought into an advisory role. I do however worry about Northern Iraq. Being a foreign student in Turkey right now, I can attest to absolute menace with which the press here is whipping up fear about Kirkuk. Turkish government leaders have made vague statements in the past about how the border with Iraq is wrong. Their argument is based on this premise, that the province which contains Kirkuk used to be part of the Ottoman Empire and was only given to Iraq by British mandate. They also claim that the region used to be majority Turkmen until Saddam moved Arabs and Kurds there. The second claim is not entirely true, and while the first one is valid, Turkey would have no international legal basis for acting anyway. They may have gotten the predominately Arab province of Hatay back, but that was in 1939 when it was under French mandate. I know Erdogan is not going to risk his EU place by doing something silly, but given the friction between him with his Islamist viewppoints and the secular dominated National Security Council, I wouldn’t be surprised if Turkey’s military made a few bluffs to undermine him. Turkey is hypernationalist country to begin with (I saw a documentary the other night claiming mohammed was a turk. and some turks believe Elvis descended from Turkish pirates), and although it is staunchly pro-western, the Kurdish scare might be enough to make the heavy handed military continue to want to meddle in Iraqi affairs.
Apparently you and Patricik Ruffini aren’t from the Juan Cole mirror universe.