TEHRAN'S IRAQ-ELECTION MEDDLING

Sadr: Iran's spearhead in Iraq.

Last updated: 2:32 am
December 8, 2008
Posted: 2:21 am
December 8, 2008

HAVING failed to sabotage the signing of a security agreement between Baghdad and Washington, the Khomeinist leadership in Tehran is trying to influence the outcome of Iraq's local elections next month.

These elections, set for 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, will concern more than 75 percent of Iraqi voters. As the first large-scale test of Iraq's mood in the postsurge era, they are important for a number of reasons.

To start with, they will be contested by political parties and independent candidates campaigning under clear labels. In the two general elections of 2005, the Shiite parties banded together by presenting a single list of candidates (the United Iraqi Alliance); all the Kurdish parties also came together in a single list. That made it impossible to gauge the support each individual party would draw under its own label.

And all major groups seem ready to participate this time around. In 2005, supporters of the maverick Shiite mullah Muqtada al-Sadr boycotted the first election, while most of the Arab Sunni parties stayed away in both votes - especially in the four provinces where Sunnis form a majority of the population.

Then, too, these elections will enable a new generation of younger Iraqi politicians - formed in the stormy years since the fall of Saddam Hussein - to challenge older figures, mostly former exiles. This new generation is closer to the proverbial "ordinary" Iraqi and, not owing its position to patronage, less likely to be drawn into the morass of corruption that threatens Iraq's long-term prospects.

Excluded from the exercise are the three Kurdish-majority provinces where elections will be held later, at a date to be fixed by the local authorities. Also excluded is the province of Tamim, the most ethnically mixed part of Iraq, after Baghdad. (The reason for its exclusion is the failure of rival parties to resolve the problem of Kirkuk, the provincial capital. Ethnic Kurds regard Kirkuk as a Kurdish city - but Arabs and Turcomans see it as their home, rejecting exclusive Kurdish domination.)

Tehran's strategy is designed to serve three goals:

1) Help the Sadrists become the largest Shiite party in Iraq. Tehran has sent thousands of militants, most of them Iranians of Iraqi origin, to help organize Sadr's campaign. Large sums of money are also coming from Iran, via both semigovernmental agencies and the clerical networks controlled from Qom.

Tehran hopes that Sadr's supporters will win control of local government in at least four of the nine Shiite-majority provinces.

2) Tehran wants its various allies to end up controlling at least six of the Shiite provinces bordering Iran. Iranian leaders make no secret of their desire to see an autonomous Shiite republic carved out of south-central Iraq, with their Iraqi clients in control.

3) Finally, Iran hopes that the victory of its allies in January would create a momentum leading to the rejection of the US-Iraq security agreement in the referendum planned for July.