Tripled

Tough week. Lost some guys. Bad civilian casualties. Guess I don’t have a whole lot to say about that. A little more about SCIRI: they got most of the seats in January ’05 because the Sunnis didn’t vote and the moderates aren’t a huge mobilized voting bloc. SCIRI is organized, and they are using the advantage of being in power to solidify their control of non-elected positions. [The Baghdad Police Chief just got sacked by my buddies at the Provincial Council. More on that later. Problematic.] And they mobilized a huge turnout for the December elections. I’ve worked elections in Chicago, Pennsylvania and Baghdad. There’s been fraud and intimidation each time. But yes, a well-organized political machine with armed supporters does a little better job of it. The moderates and the Sunnis are shell-shocked because they won’t get enough votes to counter the UIC (Shia coalition). The logical thing for either of them to do would be to align with the Kurds. Too late. The Shia already have the Kurds. All they have to do is offer them Kirkuk. There are attempts at some deal-making; what the moderates don’t have in seats they may make up for in power, by getting the juicy ministries (Interior, Defense, Oil, etc). But that can only get you so far. In the next few weeks a new government will be formed that will again be dominated by the major Shia coalition. The question was whether or not the Sadr and Badr blocs (generally speaking, the Shias who stayed and suffered under Saddam versus the ones who went to Iran to figure out how to kill him someday) could stay together. As most coalitions find out, it’s easy to run together, but eventually you have to govern together. It seems like they just might figure out how to do that. That leaves little room for negotiation, especially if your opponents are fractured and have competing agendas. In a grand irony that I will share, and that I am sure the likes of Juan Cole would relish, a unit has just rolled in here with their Humvees coded in large numbers across the door panels. A large batch of them has been coded with three zeros, “000”. In the Arabic number system (the other Arabic system), that symbol, “0” is hamsa, or five. 555 is the code used on the ballots in the election to indicate the UIC, the Shia coalition. Or, as the Iraqis would see, “000”. Guess who’s in charge of Iraq now?