SOURCE: | The Washington Post - January 24,"Iraq Election Highlights Ascendancy of Tribes
In Anbar, Clans Are Coddled, Cultivated
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 25, 2009; A01
RAMADI, Iraq -- In rugged western Iraq, once the bastion of the insurgency against the American occupation and now a freewheeling arena of electoral politics steeped in payola( YEP ), the conversation in the tribal guesthouse in Anbar province was the equivalent of a stump speech.
"If anything happens to any of our candidates, even a scratch on one of their bodies, we will kill all of their candidates!( THAT'S MY KIND OF ELECTION )" bellowed Hamid al-Hais, a tribal leader and party boss whose voice was like his build -- husky, coarse and forceful.
"That's right," shouted another sheik, who had suggested -- in jest, inshallah -- that a friend resolve a dispute by strapping on explosives and blowing himself up.
"Of course!" yelled another, who had accused the governor of urinating on Anbar.
"We'll break all the ballot boxes on their heads!" Hais declared, wagging a finger.
Part sheik and part showman, with a dose of barroom humor, Hais leads a party that has helped make Iraq's provincial elections this month the first truly competitive vote in Sunni Muslim lands since the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. By all accounts, that is a good thing( I HAVE TO AGREE. YIKES. ). But the results of next Saturday's ballot may say less about the campaigns themselves than about the political geography of Anbar, where tribes, sprawling clans steeped in tradition and courted by the U.S. military, enjoy more power than at any time since the Iraqi monarchy was toppled half a century ago.( I'M OF TWO MINDS ON THIS. TRIBALISM SEEMS A DISASTER, BUT IMPOSSIBLE TO GET RID OF. EVERYWHERE. )
Here, the new Iraq looks like the old one, imbued with politics that might be familiar to Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer who drew the country's borders after World War I.
There is a saying heard these days in Anbar: "Everyone claims they have the love of Laila, but Laila loves none of them." In other words, Laila gets to choose. The same might be said of the tribes, whose mantle everyone claims and which often demand a tidy sum for their support. Coddled and cultivated, the tribes are kingmakers.
"The center of power in Anbar," Hais called them as he sat in the guesthouse, decorated with purple, red and yellow plastic flowers, with 25 tribal leaders gathered over a sprawling, artery-clogging dish of chicken, lamb and a slab of fat, mixed with rice.
The Americans might have hoped the tribes had less power, Hais said, in their vision of a modern state built on the rule of law. "But now," he added, "they're stronger."
It is still democracy, the sheik insisted, gruffly.
A soft-spoken doctor, Sabah al-Ani, managing a crowded clinic in Fallujah, shook his head at the assertion. "If you believe in a stone," he said, "you can say it's God."
"We wanted technocrats," he went on, "and we were left with the tribes."
A Perfidy of PoliticsRaad al-Alwani, another sheik in the mold of Hais, is one of more than 520 candidates in Anbar who are running on 37 electoral lists, though only a handful have real clout. His posters adorn blast walls, cluttered with the symbols and portraits of his opponents. Promises are few. Politics are often reputation, and a name usually suffices. "You're aware of me,( I SAY THIS ALL THE TIME )" one candidate declares, a bit menacingly.
In such places as Najaf and Karbala, steeped in Shiite Muslim scholarship, the turbaned clerics often speak in abstract metaphor and sometimes impenetrable analogies. When they speak. A grand ayatollah is still remembered for answering almost any question posed to him with one of two phrases: yajuz or la yajuz, possible or not possible.( HE SOUNDS LIKE HE'S BEEN STUDYING THE TALMUD. )
In Anbar, a desert bisected by the Euphrates River that stretches west of Baghdad, such reticence would qualify as effeminate. And Alwani, as he likes to point out, is a man.
To guests, he hands out a leaflet with seven pictures of a bloodied corpse. "This is the fate of anyone who dares attack the house of Sheik Raad Sabah al-Alwani," it reads.
His criticism runs fast and no less furious.
He loathes the Iraqi Islamic Party, an heir of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the most powerful Sunni parties that has controlled the province since elections in 2005. "I wouldn't work with them even if the Euphrates River changed directions and flowed back to Syria." He barely disguises his disgust at his former allies in the Awakening, a tribal gathering sometimes called the Sons of Iraq that helped defeat the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in Sunni regions with U.S. support. Cowards, he said. "And liars, too. How are they not?" The same goes for Harith Dhari, a cleric who once spoke on behalf of the Sunni community but now lives in exile in Jordan. "A barking dog," he said dismissively.( I LIKE THIS GUY. VERY CLEAR. )
That leaves the tribal leaders, he said -- at least the ones he deems honorable. They are men who boast of their sway over the vast networks of clan, patronage and loyalty that the tribes in Iraq represent, and of their history in organizing Iraqi society for centuries and serving as a pillar of the monarchy installed by the British. Members of Albu Fahd, the largest tribe in Anbar, with a leadership determined by sometimes elusive consensus, say they can mobilize 80,000 voters -- and almost as many men with guns.
An exaggeration perhaps -- not uncommon here( YOU THINK ?) -- but not by far.
In the early years of the occupation, Anbar seemed monochromatic in its sentiments. There was an occupation, people often said, and it was the duty of Muslims to resist it. Bordering Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with a porous frontier, the province soon became the most lethal locale for the U.S. military -- al-Qaeda in Iraq effectively ruled swaths of its flat desert. The revolt by the Awakening that began in 2006, led by tribal leaders such as Hais and Alwani, vanquished al-Qaeda and brought a remarkable, if precarious, calm. In Fallujah, once an insurgent stronghold where the mutilated and charred bodies of contractors were strung from a bridge in 2004, in an indelible image of the war, the popular restaurant Hajji Hussein has reopened, drawing throngs of customers for kebab reputed to be the best in Iraq.
But as Alwani's criticism testifies, postwar Anbar is a complicated landscape of shifting loyalties, often pushed and pulled by American largess that has made tycoons of men such as Alwani, who flaunts two prized falcons at his palatial home worth $4,000 each. Even the Awakening itself is in tatters, nearly all of its original leaders having deserted it.
"People here don't have principles. Their principles are zero," said Alwani, sitting with another tribal sheik, Jassim Swaidawi, a man he described as his dear friend.
Alwani left the room, and Swaidawi acknowledged his own fleeting loyalty.
He planned to vote for someone else. "I haven't told him yet," he admitted.
The perfidy of politics here has made for a scramble as sheiks and the Iraqi Islamic Party try to cobble together a slate of candidates that can claim the greatest breadth of tribal support. The Islamic Party is unpopular but still powerful given its presence in the government, access to the official budget and recourse to patronage that awards jobs in the state and security forces.
Some have recoiled at the ferocity of the competition.
"By God, all these parties are making for us fitna," discord and conflict, said Mishaan al-Jumaila, a tribal leader in Garma, a town near Fallujah that was once so dangerous no one but its residents dared venture there.
Beneath the tumult, residents say, it is clear that the tribes, wherever their loyalties, whatever their divisions, play the decisive role. Of the most powerful groups, only Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni parliament member drawing support from the still-substantial sympathy for Hussein's Baath Party, stands apart. The rest claim the tribes' mantle.
Hais's party, appropriately called the Tribes of Iraq List, offers candidates from 11 clans, among them the powerful Albu Fahd. No less insistent is the Islamic Party, which has staked its future on its own tribal alliances. One list joins a few of its candidates with the remnants of the Awakening, led by Ahmed Abu Risha, whose brother, Abdel-Sittar, led the movement until he was assassinated in September 2007, inaugurating its divisions. Another list claims the support of Amr Abdel-Jabbar, deemed by many as Anbar's preeminent sheik. Its leaders make clear the Islamic Party is the junior partner.
Of the 29 candidates, 15 are tribal figures. The Islamic Party has 12, but they had to agree to let the tribes vet, then choose, their candidates from a pool of 25 nominees.
"As the lead partner," said Abdel-Rahman al-Zubaie, who heads the Tribal Council of Fallujah and is himself a candidate, "we had the right to say the final word."
He shook his head, in a look that comes from stating the obvious.
"Of course," he added.
'I Speak From Bitterness'In a land of swagger, Ali al-Rahal is modest. Amid the bombast, he is retiring. And in a campaign where money talks, he is penniless, having sold his and his wife's wedding rings to pay for campaign posters.
Rahal is a leader of the Sons of the Two Rivers Movement, a group of secular liberals running under the slogan "Together for Development." Shiites and Kurds sit on their board. So do a Christian and a Jew, one of the handful left in the country. They advocate human rights, transparency, an end to corruption and the rehabilitation of Iraq.
"We consider this real democracy," he said.
And no one seems to be listening. No one really can. The movement has almost no way to get the word out.
One party member sold his car for $4,000. Another donated $1,250. They are considering auctioning off their red and gold furniture, lonely as it is in an office bereft of posters, party literature and the campaign pens tribal candidates pass out.
"We can't even afford these," Rahal said, waving a leaflet the size of a playing card for one of their candidates. "And this is something simple!"
Everyone rails against the corruption in Anbar these days. Complaints run rife against the Islamic Party, accused by detractors of everything from skimming off contracts for tens of millions of dollars to build a hospital, a factory for artificial limbs and a sewage system to trying to bribe journalists with $40 Citizen watches. Sheiks protest, but their outrage seems more indignation that a rival managed to somehow steal more than they did.
To Rahal, though, that corruption speaks to a deeper malaise in postwar Anbar. To bring peace, the Americans chose allies -- tribal leaders such as Hais. To rebuild Anbar, they awarded vast contracts; in a glass case, Alwani framed a certificate of appreciation from the U.S. military that declares him "one of the best contractors the Marines have ever worked with." The result has left Rahal and liberals like him adrift in a landscape stitched together by the tribes, their new wealth and the alliances that ensued.( WE END UP COMPROMISING OUR PRINCIPLES. NECESSARY, BUT DISTASTEFUL. )
It has left him resentful, too. "Saddam Hussein gave the sheiks 5 million dinars each, right before he was overthrown, and they turned around and used the money to buy the Americans lunch. This is true," Rahal said. "You can buy and sell a lot of the sheiks for a glass of Scotch."
"Forgive me if I'm forthright," he added. "I speak from bitterness."
A few days later, Rahal showed up for an appointment at his office, which was now locked. The landlord had kicked the group out for failing to pay the $600-a-month rent. The landlord's assistant said he planned to confiscate the furniture, too. Whispering, Rahal pleaded with him to use the office for just a few minutes, and he reluctantly agreed.
A Coming-of-Age FightFor a man, just 40, whose name was known to few outside his family in Ramadi before the U.S.-led invasion and Hussein's fall, Hais carries authority well.
In his Toyota Land Cruiser, Anbar's equivalent of a Cadillac, he takes the wheel. "I drive better," he said.
He scoffs at the idea of visiting a mosque and brags of his 2,000 olive trees and show horse named for his oldest son, Adham. He shows off his scars: a partial right finger and two wounds in his right leg, suffered in a clash in 2007 with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
"The Americans told me to be afraid. They said I should fear something, but I swear to God, I've never felt fear," he said. "God doesn't want me to be killed."
Since the American invasion, myths have always seemed to shape the sentiments of Anbar. During the battles for Fallujah in 2004, residents traded stories about birds guided by God casting stones at Apache helicopters and a scented breeze that descended on fighters as they battled U.S. troops. Hais has his own lore, the story of the fight he and other tribal leaders waged against al-Qaeda in what they call a liberation and a revolution.
To him, that struggle was a coming-of-age, his in a province where his generation will wield far more power than their fathers, some of whom fled abroad during the fight.
The older sheiks "are like verbs in the past tense( INTERESTING )," Hais said. "We rely on the tribes to the greatest extent. But not the sheiks of the tribe. The sons of the tribes."
Even he seems surprised, though, by the power he was delivered.
"If you look into my heart, you'll see that I don't think the power of the tribes is a good thing," he said, sitting underneath portraits of fellow sheiks and friends and family killed in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. "With the fall of Saddam Hussein, we were ready to gaze up at skyscrapers, and all we found was houses destroyed and streets abandoned."
"This is what we got," he said.
For a moment, his rough humor subsided. So did his swagger. And for once, he turned reflective. "If we had a modern state, we wouldn't have to rely on the rule of tribes," he insisted. But until then, "a little bit of evil is better than more."
"A little bit of evil is better," he said again."
He's probably right.
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