Iraqi speaker derails Bush's dreams
The sunny scenario of Sunni Arab political integration gets dimmer as speaker al-Mashhadani takes a hard line against Shiites -- and the U.S.
By Juan Cole
Photo: Reuters/Akram Saleh/Pool
Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani at an Iraqi parliament session in May.
Aug. 17, 2006 | When George Bush met the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, he liked him. During his June trip to Baghdad, Bush sang the praises of Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who had been elected speaker in late April. "I was impressed by him," said Bush during a press conference. "He's a fellow that had been put in prison by Saddam and, interestingly enough, put in prison by us. And he made a decision to participate in the government ... It was interesting to see a person that could have been really bitter talk about the skills he's going to need to bring people together to run the parliament."
But when the Iraqi parliament reconvenes next month, the first item on the agenda will be firing Mashhadani. He has put his foot in his mouth too many times. Considering what he's been saying about the United States since his moment with the president, the end of his tenure should come as a relief to the Bush administration. "Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq?" exploded Mashhadani in a recent interview. "It is none other than the blue jinn whose name is the American Occupation." Mashhadani's imminent removal, however, is an ominous sign for the future of inclusive electoral politics in Iraq.
The White House narrative about the Iraqi parliamentary elections of last December depicted them as hopeful in their inclusiveness. For the first time, Bush administration spokesmen told us, the Sunni Arabs were forsaking the insurgency in order to join the political process. This willingness to work through the ballot box was supposed to signal the beginning of the end of the guerrilla war.
As Bush explained in a speech to the Wilson Center in Washington, "The enemy of freedom in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs ... We believe that, over time, most of this group will be persuaded to support the democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is strong enough to protect minority rights." The Bush administration policy was to crush the Saddamists and terrorists and find ways of dividing them from the less implacable "rejectionists."
Among the few advantages to Sunni Arabs of joining in the political process was their acquisition of a handful of high government posts. The office of speaker, or president, of the parliament was earmarked for a Sunni. Several candidates were found unacceptable by the other communities for having been too close in the past to the Baath Party or having been too openly sectarian in their views. After much wrangling, the parliament elected as its speaker, or "president," an outspoken Sunni, Mashhadani.
Mashhadani was born in a Shiite-majority neighborhood of Baghdad in 1948. In the 1970s, after medical school, he joined the military and became a major. But when Saddam invaded Iran in 1980, he opposed the war and barely escaped a death sentence, receiving 15 years in prison instead. He later joined the Salafi, a Sunni revivalist movement, and was reputedly a member of radical Sunni guerrilla groups such as Ansar al-Islam in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He frequented the Ibn Taymiyah Mosque, a center for hard-line Sunnism influenced by Saudi Arabia's strict Wahhabi school. The American military captured and briefly imprisoned him. On his release, he turned to civil politics and became a member of the Iraqi Accord Front, a coalition of Sunni religious parties that gained 44 seats in parliament in the December 2005 elections.
This apparent transformation from a radical allied with Ansar al-Islam, a group the Bush team had tried to link to al-Qaida, into a parliamentarian is what inspired Bush's sunny story of rehabilitation. "They tell me that he wouldn't have taken my phone call a year ago," Bush marveled, "and there I was, sitting next to the guy. And I think he enjoyed it as much as I did."
But was Mashhadani really happy with Iraq's political situation? He may have had other motives in taking the speaker's job. He has been attacking the United States, floating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and pushing back against the dominant Shiites ever since he assumed office.
Mashhadani has been particularly scathing about an incident in Mahmoudiya, in which American soldiers allegedly stalked, raped and killed an Iraqi girl. He told an Iranian satellite television station on July 7 that the Iraqi parliament must "confront foreign occupation." He said that such incidents were not isolated cases, and he insisted that only ending the foreign military presence in his country would stop them.
The following week, on al-Arabiyah satellite television, Mashhadani was asked about the sectarian violence in Iraq. He denied that the beheadings and kidnappings were being carried out by his countrymen. "These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew."
"I can tell you," he continued, "about these Jewish, Israelis and Zionists who are using Iraqi money and oil to frustrate the Islamic movement in Iraq and come with the agents." The BBC noted that by "agents," Mashhadani "appeared to be referring to secular politicians who do not identify themselves with religious or ethnic communities."
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