David S. Patel, a doctoral candidate from Stanford who has spent considerable time in Iraq, says that Sunnis will remain major players in Iraq’s future politics, even though the insurgency will diminish Sunni Arab participation in Sunday’s elections. Once elected, Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers will invite Sunnis to assist with writing the constitution, which is subject to a national referendum later this year. “They know if they write a constitution now that is unacceptable to Sunnis, it’s going to be vetoed in October,” he says. He also predicts that a Shiite nuclear scientist, Hussein al-Shahrastani, who was seen as the United Nations’ choice for prime minister before Ayad Allawi was named, will emerge as the new prime minister following the elections.

Patel was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on January 28, 2005.

Other Interviews

What do you expect to emerge from Sunday’s elections in Iraq?

This is another step in a long political process. This election will choose 275 members of a National Assembly who will take over from the interim National Council. The main job of the National Assembly is, first of all, to elect a president and two deputy presidents. That three-member team, the presidential council, will then select a prime minister who will hold most of the power during this transition period. And then, the main job of this assembly is to write a permanent constitution. That has to be done by August 15. That constitution will be subject to a national referendum by October 15.

There will be new elections for this assembly on December 15. So this assembly, which Sunday’s elections will have chosen, is only going to be here for 11 months, and then it will disband. A new assembly will be seated by December 31, 2005. So it is important to remember when you are reading all the articles with charts explaining how many seats the Shiites, the Sunnis, and Kurds won, that this is only a temporary, 11-month assembly, whose primary job is to write a constitution.

There has been a lot of talk about how it will be easy to vote in the south and the north, but virtually impossible to vote in the Sunni areas in the center, and that because of the insurgency, the Sunnis will be underrepresented in the voting. Is this a serious problem?

It depends on how you look at it. There are a lot of Sunni enclaves throughout the country. Sunnis do not only live in the so-called Sunni triangle. So in the south, for instance, you have cities like Az Zubayr and Abu Khasib just south of Basra, which have significant Sunni populations. There are Sunni populations throughout the country, so they’ll vote in higher numbers than they will in the triangle.

Within the triangle, the main places where there is going to be a lot of violence are Ninevah, Salahdin, and al Anbar provinces. But even putting all that aside, the most important job of this interim assembly is to write a permanent constitution. I should actually clarify this. Their job is not necessarily to “write” a permanent constitution. The job of this assembly is to “approve” the permanent constitution. The current constitution, the so-called Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), doesn’t actually say who’s going to write the constitution.

The TAL is the law in effect now?

Yes. What’s going to happen is this: Imagine a scenario in which not a single Sunni Arab is elected. It is not going to happen, but imagine the scenario. You’ll still see a lot of Sunni Arab parties participating in the constitution writing process.

There is nothing in the TAL that prevents them from sitting around the table and helping to write the constitution. There are a number of important Sunni political parties, like the Council of Sunni Clergymen- probably the most influential organization in the Sunni Arab areas- and the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), which have indicated that they are going to boycott the election, but are willing to participate in constitution-writing after the election. Their attitude is basically “no elections under occupation.” But they see participation in constitution-writing under occupation as all right. They see it as a step toward ending the occupation.

At the end of the day, there will be a parliament. And you’re going to see in the next eight to 10 months, the key members that are elected from this assembly- and we can predict now who they are- sitting around a table, or talking via intermediaries, with other non-elected Sunni Arabs and other non-elected prominent people throughout Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They are going to write the permanent constitution. The National Assembly will rubber stamp it by August 15. Then there will be a national referendum on October 15.

The key point is that the national referendum is subject to what has been dubbed the “Kurdish veto.” Initially, this was a condition by the Kurds to participate in this whole process. It says that any three provinces can veto this permanent constitution. Well, there are three majority Sunni Arab provinces, Ninevah, Salahadin, and al Anbar, obviously which are not participating in this election in high numbers. When you write this permanent constitution you have to take those provinces into account, because they can scuttle your plans. They can veto the permanent constitution in the October referendum.

Even if there isn’t a single Sunni elected next week, you’ll still see Shiites and Kurds take that Sunni perspective into account because they are looking into the future; they are strategic actors. They know if they write a constitution now that is unacceptable to Sunnis, it’s going to be vetoed in October.

You say we know what leaders will emerge from this election. Do you want to make a prediction?

Obviously, the United Iraqi Alliance list, which has been endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is going to do very well.

Who are likely to be the president and deputy presidents?

The president is still a largely ceremonial position, although it looks like this presidential council will have more power than the current president and deputies do. There will be the ability to veto certain legislation and things like that. These are all provisions laid down in the TAL.

I think the leader of SCIRI [the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq], Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and of the Dawa Islamiyah Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, are names that are always circulated. Another name is Hussein al-Shahrastani, who is very important. He is a nuclear scientist whose name had been floated earlier [for interim Prime Minister] both by the United Nations and by people close to Sistani. Another potential leader in a future government is Sayyid Ali Abd al-Hakim al-Safi al-Moosawi, a cleric from Basra who is close to Sistani.

It is important to remember that these election lists are not parties. These lists are temporary coalitions, done in order to do well in the elections. So, just because you see a lot of people running on the same lists together, it doesn’t mean that after the election, they will be a unified party. The United Iraqi Alliance list, which is likely to do better than any other non-Kurdish list, is made up of a lot of different parties- a couple of Islamic Dawa factions, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, SCIRI, and a lot of independent politicians. They all have their own candidates. Just because you see their list doing very well doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to agree after the election on who their candidates are going to be for different positions.

Sistani knows this. He was the real impetus behind bringing all these Shiite groups together to form this mega-list. And he has put one of his close clerics on that list in the number four position, Sayyid Ali. I think Sayyid Ali’s job in the new assembly will be to try and hold all of these guys together, and to mediate between the different groups.

The Kurds can expect a high position, right?

Yes, the Kurdish list will do extremely well. There is one unified list that is trying to capture all of the Kurdish vote.

Are the Kurds hoping to have a candidate named prime minister or deputy president?

I would expect that one of the deputy president slots will go to them. It is not out of the realm of possibility for one of the two main Kurdish leaders to become the president, either Jalal Talabani or Massoud Barzani. But in all honesty, who the president and deputy presidents are in this interim period isn’t that important.

Do you think that Shahrastani, the nuclear scientist, is likely to become the prime minister?

If I had to bet right now on an individual, it would probably be him. He is not a cleric, but he does have religious inclinations. He is not secular the way Allawi is. I think Allawi may do better than people are predicting. I have a lot of friends in Iraq who are indicating that, since there really is no secular candidate or party which is completely divorced from the influence of religious actors, Allawi is emerging as that. Many people are scared and upset with the prospect of Islamists dominating the constitution-writing process. Those people in the end, even if they don’t like him personally, are going to turn to Allawi.

When we had our interview last year, you said you were “bullish” on Iraq. Are you still bullish?

Not as much as I used to be, but I am still more so than most people. I think the insurgency is containable. I think it is very easy for us to generalize and say the Sunni Arabs are all the same. In reality, they are extremely diverse. Don’t trust anyone who tells you they are an expert on the Sunni Arabs in Iraq. They are an extremely complex group, and I don’t think we have a good sense of the different groups that are there. I think it is clear that there are some elements of the Sunni Arab population who are not going to participate in the political process no matter what. These include some of the extreme Salafists, some of the extreme Islamic fighters, most of whom are Iraqi, and some of the ex-Baathists. They are going to continue to fight and try to disrupt the process no matter what. That’s their best strategy.

There are a lot of groups among the Sunni Arabs who will participate in the political process if they see it go forward. And I think the fact that Iraq is holding the election now and sticking to the timetable for the constitution is key. This will give a tremendous incentive for some of these Sunni Arab parties who have not openly supported the insurgency, but have straddled the fence, to come on board with the constitution-writing process in the next 11 months and to contest the elections in December.

The two main Sunni parties, the Council of Sunni Clergymen and the Iraqi Islamic Party, have positioned themselves very well by boycotting the election. If they participated now, they’d be tainted by participating. But they are going to be able to help write the constitution. Then in December, they can say “we helped end the occupation,” and “we helped create a permanent constitution for Iraq.”