The crisis of the Iraqi regime is deepening day after day due to the popular protests in which the various political and security means have not succeeded in stopping it .And regarding the intractability of appointing PM to succeed the resigned Adel Abdel Mahdi, as this resignation instead of leading to a way to calm the street, it has turned into a dilemma that might bring the regime to the abyss of the fall.
After the Iraqi President, Barham Salih, extended the deadline for choosing a candidate to take over the task of forming the government, until next Thursday, there are only 72 hours left for political forces to agree on the name of the prime minister of the seventh government since the American occupation of Iraq in 2003, amid growing public rejection of all party candidates to take the post . At a time when the street’s rejection of all the names whose names were leaked as a candidate for the position is no longer the only obstacle to filling the governmental void,2 but the sharp differences between the political parties and traditional competitors for power increased the complexity of the process of searching for a successor to Abd al-Mahdi that would be compatible with these groups and capable of marketing by the angry street.
On a political level, the Alliance of Sa’aroon, which is supported by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Alliance of al-Nasir led by former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, refused on Sunday to nominate any party member to head the next government. This refusal came in response to the circulation of the name of the resigned leader from the Islamic Dawa Party and MP in Parliament Muhammad Shi’a Al-Sudani as a candidate for prime minister.
Sudani’s presidency of the government in relation to Sadr and Abadi means the return of their archenemy, former Prime Minister and leader of the Dawa Party, Nuri al-Maliki, by force to power, even it is indirectly.
Iraqis went to the polls several times after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but this did not produce stability, and did not open the door to prosperity. Hundreds of billions of dollars evaporated. When people protested, “death squads” went to the arenas to kill them . Painful facts. Some of those who danced with joy around Saddam’s body showed in their practices that they were Saddam from vein to vein. Nobody yearns for the time of the “Inspiring Leader”. Disasters of his reign are visible and it’s still fresh. But what is the size of the human and economic losses suffered by Iraq in the post Saddam era?
And by following the current developments taking place in the country, the formation of the new government tends to be in the benefit of the demonstrators who exerted pressure on the caretaker government headed by Adel Abdel-Mahdi until its resignation, according to followers of Iraqi affairs, that the government’s resignation did not come at the request of large or small blocs but rather in response to the popular movement .
And they explained that “the political blocs violated the constitution when it brought the government of Abdul-Mahdi without revealing the name of the largest bloc that is being talked about now,” pointing out that “the government resigned with the pressure of the street, and the natural thing now is that the largest bloc is the people.”
And that “the most appropriate for the Iraqi situation now is the formation of a rescue government, because the country is going through unnatural conditions, but the opinions of the political forces do not go in this direction, so it is necessary to go towards another option, which is the formation of an interim government according to the will of the people that undertakes several tasks, most notably the enactment of a fair elections law, and the formation of a new elections commission, after which the parliament will be dissolved and go toward early elections.
Yesterday, Sunday, leader of the “National Coalition”, Iyad Allawi, called on the President of the Republic for the next government to be “mini and temporary whose ceiling does not exceed one year and does not run for elections, but rather prepares for fair and transparent elections with a new election law”, stressing, in a message addressed to Salih, on the need to accelerate finding the solution to the current crisis.
On the other hand, the “al-Bina” coalition insists on being the largest bloc in parliament, as the alliance’s deputy, Mohamed Al-Baldawi, said that “al-Bina ” is the largest number and will nominate the candidate for prime minister.
The protesters insist on a basic condition that excludes all party candidates from the mandate to head the new government. The slogans of the demonstrations in Baghdad and the provinces agreed to reject all the names proposed by the parties, with the necessity of assigning the government to an independent figure whom the protesters would be satisfied with.
Observers of the Iraqi issue believe that “appointing a prime minister by the political class will be a factor in escalating the protests, and the forces of corruption are well aware of this,” stating that “everything that the corrupt endorses does not mean the demonstrators, and the demonstrations and sit-ins will remain until the last corrupt in Iraq is toppled.” Therefore, the appointment of a prime minister by the current political class does not mean the demonstrators. And they continued, that “putting up the name of the Sudani is an underestimation by the political parties and powers, and may lead to serious repercussions on the field situation,” indicating that “the Iranians should lift their hand this time, and let the Iraqis do what they want, not what is dictated to them through the political blocs that are loyal to ” Iran, ”adding that“ the greatest rejection of the Sudani is no longer due to his being a former minister or a leader in the Dawa Party, as much as provoking the Iraqis to the return of Soleimani to Iraq again to draw what he wants and imposes the Sudani on them. ”
Followers of the Iraqi issue also see that the political impasse continues in Soleimani’s inability to find a substitute prime minister for Abdel Mahdi in the face of the uprising insistence on nominating a prime minister with popular characteristics and there is no role for the parties in his nomination, but the issue in Soleimani’s view is not a choice but lies in his fear that achieving the demands of the masses in choosing the prime minister which can lead to the fall of the dominoes in the demands of dissolving parliament and the electoral law and amending the constitution by the way of removing parties, and this is what worries the Iranian regime.
They added that the Iranian military provocations to the American military presence in Iraq, which were recently repeated, were met with strong reactions from the American administration, Ali Khamenei understands more than others its significance in relation to the political chaos inside Iraq, and the possibility of accelerating its dismantling after Tehran was forced to withdraw from Iraq. Despite Iranian arrogances because of the Iranian weapons piles in the hands of thousands of poor followers on the Iraqi soil and monitored from American eyes, but Tehran is afraid to go to the last half in the military confrontation that ends its presence in Iraq amid an Iraqi people’s welcome.
And they continued that what is happening in Iraq today is a reduction of the blood’s decision that the regime chose after the choice of corruption and looting from 2003 until today, and for this reason the historical moment opened to the people, and the hour of Qassem Soleimani’s departure from Iraq is not far away, and he will cry over his terrorist past while he was implementing the project of eliminating the youth, displacing the people of Mosul, Salah al-Din, Diyala, Fallujah and Jurf Sakhar from their homes, and moving between the Iraqi mounds and valleys, boasting and healing with the people of Iraq, but his grandfather Kisra had previously bid farewell to his palace defeated in the city of Al-Madaen in eastern Baghdad.
What the political class thinks today will not be possible tomorrow. This is because the crisis, despite all the regional and international ambiguities surrounding it, was and is still Iraqi and have not been exposed to any attempt to internationalize.
The plight of Iraq is a comprehensive national, not in the procedures and details, and the loss of the independence of the Iraqi homeland is the greatest tragedy, which paved, and led to a comprehensive chaos that the gangs of weapons, theft and looting are ruling by proxy and originality.
The essence of the Iraq crisis is not to alter and flip the stalling formulas of the formation of the Iraqi government, nor to present a new electoral law to the House of Representatives, nor in a non-partisan judicial formation for the Electoral Commission, as these are all deceptive indications, it will not succeed in masking the miseries of the desperate wretched power system, and will not hide from the eye , the essence of the plight of Iraq, as a great country that lost its national independence, lost its prestige and dignity, and its immense fortunes were stolen from the source, and subjected to an abnormal constitution, developed by Paul Bremer, the ruler of the American occupation, and with one single purpose, is to erase the Arabism of Iraq after its marginalization, and the “constitutionalism ” of the process of dismantling Iraq , and fabricating a “federal” of fragmentation and division of the Society into rival sects, especially in the dominant Arab sector, and the conversion of religious sects into quarrelsome “nationalities” all the time.
The alphabet of national independence disappeared, the fabric of Iraqi national unity disintegrated, and the Arab characteristic backbone of the Iraqi formation was broken, and wars of displacement and sectarian separation took place between the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq, which was instinctively realized by the Shiite uprising crowd, and their angry revolutions continued, until they culminated in the recent continuous uprising, whose youths are flocking to the death and martyrdom, to seek the restoration of the Arabism of Iraq and its liberation from the bond of dual humiliation, set by the American occupation and Iranian hegemony, and with a heroic determination apparent among the revolutionaries who want to restore Iraq to the Iraqis first. There is no value in any talk of democracy in an occupied and humiliated country, as the democracy is not a means of distraction and blindness, but rather a means of building the authority of a free people.
Iraqi Studies Unit
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies