Vol. 74/No. 11      March 22, 2010

There are 96,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The administration of Barack Obama says it intends to scale that down to 50,000 by September. “Unless there’s a catastrophic event, we don’t see that changing,” Odierno told reporters a day after the elections.

The reduction is connected to Washington’s plans to further increase its troops in Afghanistan from 75,000 to 98,000 by the end of the year. It also reflects an assessment that, seven years after its invasion, Washington has laid the basis for furthering its interests in Iraq and the broader region with fewer soldiers.

The timing and scope of a U.S. troop reduction, however, will hinge in part on the outcome of the elections and the struggle among competing bourgeois forces for position in a coalition government that will ensue. This process lasted five months following the last parliamentary elections in 2005.

On election day, a terrorist bombing killed 25 in Baghdad, while smaller attacks throughout the country killed 13 others and wounded more than 80. But this violence, designed to intimidate the population and disrupt the election, appeared to have a limited effect on voter turnout.

Initial figures show 62 percent of eligible voters case ballots. The Kurdish areas in the north saw the highest turnout, reported at 80 percent. Nationwide, turnout was lower than during the country’s last parliamentary election in 2005. But it was much higher this time in the western Sunni Arab areas where bourgeois forces—many of whom had been part of the insurgency in alliance with al-Qaeda before reversing course and backing Washington—encouraged people to vote in order to gain greater influence in the government.

Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni ruling class dominated the government, but was marginalized following its overthrow.

The majority of the country is Shiite Arab. Sunni Arabs comprise roughly 20 percent of the population, and the Kurds, an oppressed nationality in the region, somewhere between 15 percent and 20 percent.

While election results are not yet in, no party coalition is expected to win a majority. There are three major contending coalitions, along with several others that are expected to win seats.

The Iraqi National Alliance, a Shiite religious party coalition closely allied with Tehran, lost some ground in last year’s provincial elections. The coalition is dominated by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose Iranian-trained Badr Brigades militia has been incorporated into the Iraqi army and represents part of its base of power.

The party supports autonomy for the majority-Shiite oil-rich south and has worked to curb the power of Sunni forces with connections to the former Baathist government under Hussein. Forces loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is currently in Iran, are also loosely tied to the coalition.

The State of Law coalition, dominated by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party, came out on top in the provincial elections last year. Dawa was originally a Shiite religious party. Although it remains a Shiite-dominated party, it has been remolded with a secular, Iraqi nationalist line.

As prime minister, al-Maliki secured alliances with a section of Sunni capitalists and led a successful U.S.-backed military offensive against al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in 2008. He has backed restrictions on allowing former Baathists in the government and worked against Kurdish demands for greater autonomy and control over resources.

The other major contender is the Iraqiya Alliance, a Shiite-Sunni Arab coalition led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a Shiite. Two of its leaders were disqualified from running for alleged Baathist sympathies. It promotes a move away from close relations with Tehran, toward greater ties with Arab states in the region, and has broad support in the Sunni areas. Allawi, a major critic of al-Maliki, has accused the government of voter fraud.

While the election reflects some of Washington’s gains in the region, what the U.S. rulers have set in motion in Iraq also has the unintended consequence of opening political space for working people to organize and accelerating conflicts that threaten to upset the balance of forces Washington seeks to maintain.

Kurdish parties, which held 19 percent of parliament and the Iraqi presidency, claimed a decisive electoral victory in the oil-rich disputed city of Kirkuk. If true, it could strengthen Kurdish claims to the city and its resources. While Washington maintains an alliance with the Kurdistan Regional Government, it opposes Kurdish claims on Kirkuk as well as the broader Kurdish struggle—a stance shared not only by the Sunni and Shiite capitalists in Iraq, but by those in Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere in the region.
 
 
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