As I walked to work late this morning (remember, if you've been following along, Sunday morning constitutes our weekend) I saw that the dining facility had fired up some huge grills and were barbecuing chicken and ribs. The first whiff instantly carried me 7,000 miles west, back to the good old U.S of A. and any of a number of Independence Day picnics. A real poignant reminder that I am a stranger in a strange land.
We did celebrate a bit in our own way. My office gathered around dinner time to eat pizza and play poker. It was a slow enough evening that we didn't bother going back to work, thus squeezing a couple of extra hours of free time into the holiday.
Independence Day is a good step-off point to talk about Iraqis forming their own government and taking control of their own destiny.
I have so far offered up just the very basics of Iraqi societal structure, and only to provide some sense of the complexity of trying to move this country toward an inclusive government, that being one whose many pieces coalesce to form the whole. It is easy to overlook some of the more obscure slices of the ethno-sectarian mix and there are a lot of them. And it seems most of them have an "extremist" segment, making it dangerous to slight them.
Back in the U.S., we are typically confronted each election with the minimal choice, two (usually sub-optimal) candidates representing each of the dominating parties. Representative government in Iraq, affectionately termed "Iraqracy," has lists instead of parties. And the election is "open list," meaning any self-identifying group can form a list, name a leader for the list, and join the fray. What everyone is aiming for is as many of the Council of Representative (COR) seats as they can muster.
They want as many seats as they can muster because the only way to truly have a role in forming the government is to have one of the most winning lists, meaning large blocks of seats in the COR. According to the Iraq constitution, the list with the most seats is given the role to form the government. And this is where it really departs from our American reality. We vote for all of the senators and congresspersons that represent us, but we also vote for our government leader, the president.
In Iraq, it is the responsibility of the list with the most seats to find a way to name the Prime Minister, the President, and the Speaker for the COR, the top governmental jobs, in that order. Seems simple enough, but it requires a majority (163 COR members) to select these positions and the leading list has only 91. And so the real fun begins.
Campaigning for representation were 86 blocs, lists, parties, and unaffiliated individuals. Just try to give equal air time to these folks on TV. Of the 86, just 14 gained sufficient votes to seat members in the COR. 90% of these seats went to just four lists, and now the leaders of those lists are locked in a long and seemingly intractable struggle to form the government.
The leading list, Iraqiya, seemed to have the upper hand by virtue of the most seats when the election results were announced. The incumbent Prime Minister, who has no intention of giving up his post (the most powerful one in the government), is not a member of the winning list. He protested the results of the election and forced a recount of the biggest district (Baghdad) and while this was going on he convinced another list to join his State of Law list.
The recount did not change the results (in fact it validated the integrity of the voting process) but now the current PM claims he has the largest winning bloc by virtue of the two lists joining. To us Americans, this is wrong on a lot of levels, but it remains unresolved here four full months after the election and it is really making the Iraqi populace a bit upset. No seated government means no new policy or regulation, both of which are critical to a lot of things that need to happen to get this country moving forward economically.
And that is where things stand, still, today (pun intended). There is more, but this is enough for now.
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