The death of the leading Shia Islamist politician who forged Iraq’s current governing majority, along with the abrupt reconfiguration of Shia forces into a new coalition that excludes the current prime minister, have thrown a new spanner into the already sputtering engine trying to pull Iraq back into some kind of normality.
A dangerous vacuum has opened at the heart of Iraqi politics, just as US troops have pulled out of the country’s cities and begun the restoration of its sovereignty.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq who died last week in Tehran, occupied a unique position. He was the principal client in Baghdad of both the US and Iran, the confidant simultaneously of the Bush administration and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.
He took over from his elder brother, assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2003 in a massacre at the Imam Ali shrine in the holy city of Najaf that started Iraq’s slow descent into a sectarian civil war in which the Supreme Council’s militia eventually took full part.
Hakim was the main architect of the Shia-Kurdish alliance that won the 2005 elections, blessed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric. All that has now fallen apart.
Last week also saw the emergence of a new Shia coalition, the Iraqi National Alliance, in opposition to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Da’wa party. It is built around the Supreme Council and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shia cleric who has been burnishing his theological credentials in Iran.
At one level, this is a dispute about the inheritance of the Da’wa, Iraq’s original Islamist party, founded 50 years ago by the Sadr and Hakim clerical dynasties.
Yet it highlights once again how Iraq’s Shia politicians are failing to rise above factionalism and to embrace the national interest. With general elections due in January, the violent resumption of Sunni insurgency and a stand-off between neighbouring Iran and the west in prospect, this is crippling.
Shia leaders have not bound the minority Sunni, dispossessed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein, into an inclusive new order all Iraqis can see as legitimate.
There is a structural weakness in Shia politics. The Shia have tended to build up wealth and institutions around religious leaders rather than political formations, which are anaemic and invertebrate by comparison. That is something Iraq, with the Shia now in the saddle, cannot afford.
