Too little, too late? That is the question to be asked about Iraq’s Prime Minister-designate Haider al Abadi as he works to form a new government within the 30 days allotted to him by the Iraqi constitution.
Now that the former Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has stepped down, it marks Iraq’s second peaceful, constitutional transfer of power from one legitimately elected civilian government to another. No other Arab country, and no Middle Eastern countries save Turkey and Israel, has achieved this even once.
A fair amount is known about Abadi, who is thought to be affable and modern in his outlook. He has been at the front of Iraq’s second rank of politicians since the post-Saddam days began over a decade ago. The 62-year-old son of a prominent Baghdad doctor and health official, two of his brothers were executed under Saddam for belonging to the Islamic Dawa party; he spent a productive exile in England, where he received a doctorate in engineering from the University of Manchester and then worked fairly successfully in the “rapid transit” (people movers, urban rail, and the like, apparently) field in London from the 1980’s until the early 2000’s. He returned to Iraq and served as Minister of Communications in 2003 and 2004, before being appointed as the chair of the Iraqi Parliament’s Finance Committee. Crucially, for today’s challenges, while in that role Abadi was the point man in a highly contentious and damaging struggle against the Kurds regarding allocations in the 2013 budget.
Unremarked in current coverage are three encouraging clues about his orientation towards Iran—traditionally Iraq’s biggest ally. Abadi has a reputation in Iraq for his British associations; the United States played an important role in persuading Abadi to start splitting Maliki’s party from within about a month ago, and Iran had little to do with his emergence. In line with all of this, Abadi has made it clear that the United States, not Iran, is his military provider-of-choice in the fight against the militant jihadist group Islamic State.
Almost all of Iraq’s top politicians, even the secular ones and those whose support is mainly Sunni (the minority faction in Iraq’s Sunni-Shia split), have to go to Iran’s capital Tehran to kiss the ring of the mullah regime at least once in their career, and many go more often than that. Abadi, it seems, has not been there once since the 2003 fall of Saddam, if at all. Abadi received the three biggest endorsements in the Sunni world—the Saudis, the Arab League, and Turkey’s Islamist President-elect and former Prime Minister Erdogan—as swiftly (this past Tuesday, one day after his formal designation by Iraq’s Kurdish President Fuad Masoum) as he received that of the regime in Tehran.
Abadi’s main task will be to make Iraq once more a place that is tolerable to Kurds and normal Sunnis. Maliki, after successfully meeting the key challenge of his first term, taking Basra back from pro-Iranian Shia militias in 2006, proved to be uniquely ill-suited to this. His personality was simply wrong for the job: bigoted, bitter and backward-looking.
Abadi is none of these things, but not being Maliki will hardly suffice. What, then, should observers look for as an Abadi-led ministry emerges? First, it must be remembered that the Abadi faction that deposed Maliki comprises about 55 of the Iraqi Parliament’s 328 Members: less than 17 per cent. So the government that emerges will be more a reflection of the current balances and urges within the intricate Iraqi political system than it is of Abadi’s personal vision or influence.
With Maliki, who started his own premiership as a much more obscure player, the world had to wait for the second term for the emergence of a genuine, if inept, autocrat. Abadi’s personality and outlook make a Maliki-style metastasis far less likely this time around. Were the new PM-designate inclined in that direction, however, the far more real concessions that will have to be made to Sunnis and Kurds up front this time, in a world where a group as dangerous as Islamic States (IS) exists, may provide new checks and balances on any hyper-sectarian authoritarianism of the Maliki kind.
Many of the key clues on these matters will come soon, as Abadi works to put together a government by the 12th September deadline. With regard to the Kurds, the biggest issues will be embodied in the choice of the next Oil Minister. Abadi was very much a supporter of Maliki’s hard line against the Kurds on the various oil questions: export pipelines, disputed fields and contracts, revenue sharing.
As to the Sunnis, observers will want to keep an eye on the armed ministries in particular. Former PM Ayad Allawi is a secular Shia who won a plurality in the 2010 election as the adopted standard-bearer of Iraq’s more secular Sunnis. A Shia trusted on secular nationalist grounds by most Sunnis, he would be a good choice for Defence Minister. Of the other ministries known as “sovereign” in Iraqi political parlance, namely Interior, Oil, Foreign, and Finance, the latter may be the Sunnis’ most likely consolation prize.
For Abadi’s inclinations on other challenges that will determine the long-term success or failure of his premiership, we will have to wait. Apart from his congenial and pragmatic personality, the historical indications are not encouraging. Federalism is ultimately the key to allowing the three main groups populating Mesopotamia, which itself is after all the oldest political reality on earth, to cohabit. Despite the fact that Iraq’s constitution mentions the word “federal” and its variants 47 times, Maliki could not abide the concept, with disastrous consequences as we are seeing; Abadi has done little to show that he differs. Iraq’s economy, meanwhile, is desperate for a lifting of the heavy hand of Saddam-era statism, but Abadi, as head of the Finance Committee, went along with his boss Maliki’s continuation of those policies.
In terms of the immediate crisis, we will know what the Kurds and mainstream Sunnis really think of Abadi’s ministry when it is put to the Parliamentary vote in three or four weeks’ time. The current horrors, and the insistence of the United States on various conditions for the military support Abadi needs, should see to a mostly positive outcome in this first step on a long road.
The tragedy of this sort of discussion, however, as any observer of Lebanon and indeed of Iraq since Saddam will know, is that when ministries that are supposed to be delivering essential services are instead treated as ethno-sectarian weapons and patronage prizes, with ministers who are therefore accountable only to individual wedges of the electorate, subsequent elections are also contested on identity grounds and the cycle continues. Call it the Curse of the National Unity Government.
Bartle Bull, an author and journalist who runs an investment fund in Iraq, is a former Foreign Editor of Prospect.
