WHAT TOOK SO LONG
by Amir Taheri
New York Post
May 1, 2005

May 1, 2005 -- TALK to anyone interested in the future of Iraq these days and you are likely to hear a note of frustration. "What are they doing in Baghdad?" asks a senior British official, expressing London's feelings about the long delay in the formation of the new Iraqi government which has just been unveiled.

It took almost three months, from the day Iraqis turned out in record numbers to vote in their first free elections, for Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari to submit his ministerial list to the three-man presidential council for approval before presenting it to the National Assembly.

There is concern that the same slowness could prevent Iraq from meeting the various deadlines it has set for itself — to write a new constitution, submit it to a referendum, hold a general election, form a permanent government and then negotiate the phased withdrawal of the U.S. forces, all in the course of the current year.

The snail-pace method of forming the government has allowed some Western opponents of the liberation to conclude that Iraqis and Arabs in general, are not ready for pluralist politics and had better be left to stew in the despotic juice of their history.

There is, however, another way of looking at the current Iraqi experience. The repeatedly delayed formation of the government could, in fact, be regarded as a sign that the new Iraqi leadership is bending over backward to play pluralism. This leadership has used the past three months as a crash course in learning the art of political negotiations and compromises.

ALTHOUGH the election was held on Jan. 30, the final results were not officially announced until mid-February. And those results gave no single party or group a majority in the National Assembly, thus making coalition-building imperative.

Coalition politics is an arduous proposition at the best of time, even in mature democracies.

In the case of Iraq, this was further complicated because the two big blocs that took part, the main Shiite list and the Kurdish list, were themselves the fruits of coalitions formed prior to the election.

The Shiite list consisted of almost a dozen different parties — with those parties sometimes containing markedly rival wings. The Kurdish list brought together six parties and groups, including some that had a long history of mutual enmity. This meant that each of the two big coalition groups, the Shiites and the Kurds, had first to sort things out within its own sphere before entering into talks with others over power-sharing.

The last two weeks of February were thus taken up by horse-trading within the United Iraqi Alliance, the principal Shiite bloc backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

The key issue was the choice of a prime minister.

There were four candidates in the field, representing the four main blocs within the alliance. At one point, all the groups went to Sistani and asked him to choose the prime minister. He refused — because he wanted the new leadership to remain accountable only to the Iraqi electorate.

Once al-Jaafari had been chosen as a compromise candidate for premiership, the fight started over who should fill the other key posts of the new administration, notably the three-man presidential council, the speakership of the parliament, and the key ministries.

THE task was further complicated by the Transition Administration Law (TAL) left behind by Paul Bremer, the American "pasha" who ruled the country until the transfer of power to Premier Iyad Allawi's interim government last June. The TAL requires that all key positions be agreed upon with a two-third majority.

Theoretically, the united Shiite list and its Kurdish counterpart, which together do have a two-third majority in the parliament, could have filled all the posts as they pleased. They decided not to do so because they knew that Iraq's fragile democracy needed the largest possible measure of participation if it is to defeat its armed enemies.

Thus the entire month of March was devoted to negotiations between the leaders of the Shiite and Kurdish lists.

Reaching consensus was not easy. The Kurds insisted to retain a right of veto under any future constitution. They also refused to disband their separate armies, known as the "Peshmerga," despite the fact that they had de facto control over the Defense Ministry. At the same time, the Kurds continued to press their claim to Kirkuk and taking measures to change its ethnic composition to their own advantage.

UNDER other circumstances, any of these issues could have led not only to a breakdown of coalition talks but to civil war. The fact that the worst did not happen is to the credit of Iraq's new pluralist system, in which problems could be resolved through negotiations and compromise rather than fighting and ethnic cleansing.

The main Shiite list could have made a deal with Allawi's list and formed a purely Shiite Cabinet. That, however, would have been a recipe for civil war while provoking most of Iraq's neighbors.