More than four months after it was elected on 15 December 2005, the Iraqi Council of Representatives (Parliament) was finally able to nominate a new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, along with a State President, Jalal al-Talabani (the incumbent), and a new Speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. The long delay was ostensibly due to the crisis surrounding Ibrahim al-Ja’fari, the interim Prime Minister, who was initially nominated by the Shi’ite coalition (in February 2006) as its candidate for the post but was unable to put...
The elections of December 2005 are the crown jewel in American-led efforts to redesign the state of Iraq. Following the post-invasion dismantling of existing state structures, including the Ba’th Party, the army and other security organs, and after the October 2005 constitutional referendum, these elections were intended to provide a strong democratic foundation for the new Iraq. But their success is by no means assured, and many challenges remain.
2005 will be remembered as the year of the freest elections in Iraqi history. Iraqis will have gone to the polls three times by the end of this year. In January, they elected their representatives for an interim parliament, in October they voted on a constitution, and in December they are scheduled to choose a regular parliament. These events stand in sharp contrast to the experience of 35 years under Ba’thist rule, during which there were no elections at all for the first twelve years and then only sham votes for a powerless...
The birth-pangs of Iraq’s new constitution are symptomatic of the deep crisis afflicting the country, and even if an agreed document is eventually produced, it may not only fail to resolve the country’s underlying problems but could actually make them worse. After all, in its eighty-five years of existence, Iraq has had no fewer than six constitutions. The first was imposed in 1925 by the British authorities and it remained in effect for thirty-three years. But despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it bore all the...
The elections for a provisional parliament held in Iraq on January 30 have been described as a revolutionary event that will change the face of Iraq, and perhaps of the entire Middle East. But despite the success inherent in the very fact that an election took place, the judgment that it heralds a revolutionary transformation is, at best, premature. After all, this “free” election actually took place under the watchful eyes of no less than 300,000 foreign and Iraqi security forces. And the historical experience of Iraq...
Did Iraq possess weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the war? Can a democratic regime be imposed on Iraq? Might Iraq become a locus of regional instability? What will the international system look like under the world’s only superpower, the United States? How did the media shape public opinion in the course of the war? These and other questions are explored int his book, which dwells primarily with assessing the results of the war in Iraq.
America’s military campaign in Iraq came as no surprise to Israel. In consequence, the country had time to make preparations at many levels, including plan for a coordinated information policy that was designed to keep citizens informed of the situation, present Israel’s case to the outside world should Israel lose its bystander status and become involved in the war, and most significantly, ensure that the government’s positions came across with one voice. At the heart of the plan lay the decision to appoint a...
In the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq certain basic implications for the region are already apparent, though their intensity will become clear only in the future. The fall of Saddam’s regime and Iraq’s strategic decline have signficantly weakened the group of radical countries in the Middle East and are likely to buttress the region’s moderate states. Iraq has been stripped of its military power, including conventional and WMD capabiltiies, which not only limits the threat Iraq poses to the region, but may...
