A COURT DECISION TO DISQUALIFY CANDIDATES FOR ALLEGED TIES TO THE BAATH PARTY PUSHES IRAQ TO THE TIPPING POINT

Iraqi are boiling as a court threatens to disqualify dozens of candidates, including election winner Iyad Allawi, to prevent former Baath party members from returning to office, the Huffington Post's Firas Al-Atraqchi. 

The court's decision comes as the recommendation of the Justice and Accountability Committee (JAC), the group responsible for keeping Baathists out of office in post-Saddam Iraq.  JAC first called for all 52 candidates to be disqualified after the March 7 election and criticized the Iraqi electoral commission for letting them run at all.

Last week, the electoral commission bowed to pressure from the State of Law coalition lead by incumbent leader PM Nouri al-Maliki to conduct a manual recount for the Baghdad province.  Now other politicians are coming forward to demand recounts in other provinces. 

The recount row comes as Mosul Kurds and Arabs work to lessen the tension created by the Arab Hadbaa party's 2009 win that pushed out Kurdish legislatures.  In the last few days, the Mosul peace makers have announced a settlement that should end the conflict and bridge the Arab-Kurdish divide.

All that good will is in jeopardy now as events in Baghdad threaten to overturn the election results.  Al-Atraqchi says, "it is unknown whether the Kurds will continue to negotiate with Hadbaa, a member of the Iraqiya coalition, if Allawi is no longer considered the winner of the March 7 election."

Iraq is perpetually on the brink of upset somewhere, somehow, but Al-Atraqchi worries the undoing of these election might mean the Iraqi people loss of faith in their electoral system:

In the days preceding the March 7 election, there were efforts to bar leading Sunni politicians - many of whom had allied with Allawi, a Shia - from the ballot. These were in tandem with attempts to also disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Diaspora Iraqis from casting out-of-country votes.

More dangerously, however, were the endless efforts of the JAC to ensure that as many Sunnis as possible were prohibited from participating in the elections and thereby discouraging the Sunni community from casting their votes, much akin to their 2005 boycott.

The peril lies in the fact that JAC is headed by Ahmed Chalabi and Ali al-Lami, both of whom ran as candidates for the Iraqi National Alliance, a group formerly allied with Maliki's political bloc, in the March 7 elections.

Al-Atraqchi calls the issue a "crisis that cannot be understated."  This post-election debacle implies that "no election result is safe from court intervention and constitutional brigandry in the new Iraq."

The JAC's "de-Baathification" of Iraq is a noble effort: Saddam empowered his party and disenfranchised others, and what is better for a post-dictatorship reality than to rid ones country of all things "dictator."  What the JAC failed to remember is that almost 4.5 million Iraqis belonged to the Baath party - most of whom were not henchmen of Saddam but mere citizens or technocrats.  More to the point, the majority of Iraq's technocrats before the war belonged to the Baath party.  This effectively keeps people who know how to run a country and revive civil infrastructure from being able to do so. 

By barring former Baathists from office, Al-Atraqchi says, "only Iraqis who were in self-exile abroad could rule in Iraq. As many of these were sponsored and supported by Iran, it is not surprising then that many secular nationalist Iraqis view themselves as under a second-tier Iranian occupation."

On election day, Al-Atraqchi says Allawi did not appeal to voters because he is Shia or a former Baathist, but because he believes in a non-sectarian Iraq.  A great many of his rivals, including Nouri al-Maliki have been fostered by Iran over the years.  Ammar al-Hakim has also been aligned with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its military affiliate, the Badr Brigades.

With the country embroiled in sectarian strife in and out of the political sphere and elections so quickly torn asunder, Iraq may be bracing for all-out lawlessness.  Al-Atraqchi ends:

They are now asking themselves what has changed since Saddam was ousted. Yes, a more independent media they may have, but newspapers written by free journalists will hardly shield them from the bullets and machetes they fear may soon be coming their way.

Photos: Flag (BW Jones); Iraqi woman after voting (DVIDSHUB); Iyad Allawi (Omar Chatriwala) - Flickr

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