https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-art-of-the-deal-has-failed-him-in-negotiations-with-both-pyongyang-and-tehran-1.734107

On Thursday, as Donald Trump was cancelling his scheduled summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the “deal of the day” on the White House gift shop website was a replica of the official summit commemorative coin at the bargain rate of $19.95.

Mr Trump’s letter to Mr Kim was a masterpiece of his own unique rhetoric, clearly dictated by the US president himself. Both the coin and the letter would be amusing if so many lives weren’t at stake.

It’s a considerable relief that Mr Trump isn’t going ahead with the meeting. When both sides are obviously unprepared for major negotiations and, especially, don’t share a common understanding of key terms, disaster can ensue.

At the July 2000 Camp David summit, for example, it emerged that Palestinians and Israelis were describing completely different outcomes when using the same phrase, “Palestinian state”. Palestinians anticipated a fully sovereign, contiguous UN member state in almost all the territories occupied in 1967, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-25/iraq-s-election-the-u-s-lost-but-iran-lost-worse

The only thing that’s clear from Iraq’s May 12 election is who the voters rejected: Iran and the U.S. These two outside powers have dominated their affairs since 2003, and this is the latest sign that a growing number of Iraqis are eager to reassert their identity and independence.

Otherwise, things remain complicated. The biggest number of parliamentary seats, 54, went to a coalition headed by the populist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A coalition of pro-Iranian Shiite parties finished second with 47. The bloc led by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, the U.S. favorite, followed closely with 42.

It takes 165 votes to form a governing majority in parliament, and with large numbers of smaller ethnic, sectarian and regional groupings in play, months of jockeying for position are virtually inevitable.

This is compounded by the dreadful 2010 court ruling which, as I explained on these pages before the election, mandates that first crack at forming a new government does not automatically go to the electoral victor but, assuming nobody has an outright majority, to whoever can assemble the biggest post-election bloc.

Thus all the election did was establish a framework for the real politics, which are going on right now in many a smoke-filled room. It will take months. There are two obvious potential outcomes with substantial regional and international consequences.

Many Americans will remember Sadr from the post-invasion occupation, when he commanded a militia that attacked U.S. troops and committed atrocities against the Sunni population. At that time, Sadr was primarily seen as the pro-Iranian, Shiite sectarian force in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, particularly in slum areas.

Over time, however, he has emerged as a type of politician Americans are now quite familiar with: mercurial, hyperbolic and idealistic, as well as protean and ever-changing. He has never reconciled with the U.S., but has had a bitter falling out with Iran.

He has successfully refashioned himself as a nationalist, with tremendous appeal in urban areas and, surprisingly, considerable support among Sunni Arabs. Even the three Iraqi communists who just got elected ran in his coalition.

He combines “Iraq first” rhetoric, which is simultaneously anti-American and anti-Iranian, with a fiery condemnation of existing politics and governance and demands for professionalism and technocrats in government, all the while lashing out at those he casts as political hacks or religious demagogues. This transformation has also allowed Sadr to rebuild ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries.

It’s hard to get to 165 parliamentary votes without Sadr’s team. That probably means trouble for the U.S. presence in the country, but also potentially the emergence of an Iraqi government that is surprisingly independent of Tehran’s influence and open to reintegrating Iraq into the Arab world.

Of course, it’s also possible that if all of the pro-Iranian forces in parliament — including the Fatah Alliance representing the sectarian Shiite militias — along with parties loyal to Abadi and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as smaller groups such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan band together, an overtly pro-Tehran government could emerge. Iran’s plenipotentiary to its Arab clients, General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has been reportedly barnstorming throughout Iraqto try to arrange precisely that.

Iran’s anxiety about the next Iraqi government is considerably intensified because of the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal and many clear-cut signs from Washington’s regional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that Tehran will now face financial warfare and quite possibly a broader range of other pressures designed to cut its influence down to size.

Saudi Arabia has made considerable headway in recent years in weakening Iran’s grip on Iraq and re-establishing a Sunni and Gulf Arab political presence in the country. Riyadh would surely welcome a coalition led by or centered around Sadr and including Abadi’s bloc, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the secular National Alliance group headed by Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister.

There is no likelihood of an overtly anti-Iranian government in Baghdad. But there is a real possibility, and arguably even a likelihood, of a Sadr-led coalition that is non-Iranian in orientation. How stable that could be, and to what extent it could really contribute to the emergence of an increasingly independent Iraq not under the control of the U.S., Iran or the Arab countries, remains to be seen.

Ironically, whether the new government is basically pro-Iranian or not, almost all parties will eventually join it. Since 2005, no matter who ultimately formed a government, almost everyone eventually got on board. Iraq is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and it’s hard to put your hand in the cookie jar if you’re standing outside the kitchen and sulking.

Sadr is best positioned to form the next government, but he can’t lead it directly because he did not sully himself with crude politicking and run for parliament himself. His high-minded rhetoric will make life difficult for anyone else who tries to live up to his lofty bombast.

Iran will do its best to block him and get its own clients back in power in Baghdad. But the election results have rendered that a long shot. No other country has accumulated as much influence in Iraq in recent years as Iran, so it’s well-positioned to play a long game. The converse is that no other country now has as much to lose in Iraq as Iran.

With Tehran bracing for serious financial and other blows from the U.S. and perhaps its allies, a significant loss of influence in Iraq would be a very bad precedent. The trajectory of Iraqi politics after the election will be an early and important indication of where Iran’s Middle Eastern regional clout may be headed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-21/containing-iran-there-s-an-arab-plan-b

Plan A was the nuclear deal. That’s over. Now key Gulf states want the U.S. to flex more muscle.

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal didn’t draw much international applause, but three U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — warmly welcomed the move.

Israel had long said that the deal didn’t do enough to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, and Gulf Arab countries believed it gave Iran cover for an intensified campaign of destabilizing the Arab world. And they have plenty of ideas when it comes to drawing up a Plan B for a U.S.-led containment campaign against Iran.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE never shared President Barack Obama’s conviction that engagement and sanctions relief could moderate Iran’s revolutionary brashness, regional meddling and support for sectarian extremists.

So they’re pleased by Trump’s rhetorical attacks and reimposed sanctions against the Iranian regime, and they want the U.S. to foreclose any efforts by European countries that remain signatories to the nuclear deal to find a way to let their companies keep doing business with Iranian institutions.

However, Iran’s expansion as a regional power largely took place before the nuclear deal was signed, and the comprehensive international sanctions that existed in the years leading up to the agreement did not deter Tehran’s support for extremist groups in Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen.

So the Gulf states don’t expect sanctions alone to do the trick. They hope that with Islamic State crushed in Iraq and Syria, Washington will now lead a coordinated regional strategy to cut Iran’s power down to size.

Among other things, they want limited and focused military action to reverse some of the gains Iran has made since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Indeed, they’ve already taken on the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as the local al-Qaeda affiliate. They may also hope to play a role in confronting Iran’s lawless behavior in the waters of the Gulf itself.

They are looking for Washington to take the lead in confronting Iran in Iraq, but there, too, Saudi Arabia has shown it is willing to play a diplomatic, political and financial role.

Perhaps the most strategically vital theater in any such campaign would be Syria, which is far from the Gulf countries. There, they hope that Israel will enforce its own red lines on Iranian conduct and make life difficult for the Hezbollah militants in Syria and possibly even in their home base of Lebanon.

They would urge the U.S. to prevent Iran from taking advantage of the collapse of Islamic State in western Iraq and eastern Syria in order to create a secured military corridor running from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Such a strategic upheaval, if secured and consolidated, would ensure that Iran emerges as a regional superpower.

Gulf Arab countries also want to work with the U.S. to persuade Turkey and Russia that their interests in Syria are not served by an empowered and aggressive Iran. Otherwise, Russia could prove a major obstacle to reducing Iran’s influence in Syria and getting Hezbollah to go back to Lebanon.

Finally, while the Gulf countries don’t want an all-out war with Iran, there are signs of Arab and American encouragement of uprisings by Iranian ethnic minorities such as Baluchis, Arabs and Kurds.

The goal isn’t regime change, partly because that’s not considered a serious possibility at the moment. What they want, instead, is a sustained containment campaign to pressure Iran to change its behavior and ambitions and constrain its ability to destabilize neighbors and spread influence.

It’s a big ask, and probably bigger than many Gulf Arab leaders realize. After decades of U.S. leadership in the region, these countries grew used to, and benefited from, a U.S.-enforced regional order. But now, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans across the political spectrum have an advanced case of Middle East war fatigue. Trump’s “America First” campaign didn’t signal much enthusiasm for the kind of interventionist foreign policy that these Gulf allies are hoping for.

But if the U.S. wants to combat terrorism and confront Iran, as the administration insists it does, Trump’s idea of withdrawing the more than 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria is a nonstarter.

The Gulf countries aren’t asking for a repetition of the 2003 adventure in Iraq, which they didn’t support or encourage. What they want is a multi-front effort to roll back Iran’s influence by defanging its proxies, supporting its enemies and insurgents and choking off its economy. Only Washington, they believe, can do that. The idea is especially to weaken Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its clients around the region.

Containing Iran will take time, effort and troops and will not be painless. But it needn’t and shouldn’t be a madcap adventure like the campaign that began in 2003 to remake Iraq in an American image. Instead, as Russia has demonstrated in Syria, even in the Middle East it’s possible to secure limited goals with limited means, especially if allies work together. That’s what Saudi Arabia and the UAE are hoping is in the works for a Plan B regarding Iran.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/palestinians-need-a-gandhi-like-figure-to-front-non-violent-protests-against-israeli-rule-1.731761

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/the-meaning-of-nakba-israel-palestine-1948-gaza/560294/

For the people of Palestine, the trauma of 70 years ago never ended.

Violence is intensifying in Gaza as the United States opens its new embassy in Jerusalem, a convergence of current politics and long-simmering tensions in the region. Israeli forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens and wounding hundreds more, Palestinian officials said.

May 14 marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding; May 15 is a day Palestinians know as their nakba, or “catastrophe,” the traumatic expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 by Israelis. This event both defined their future of statelessness and occupation, and now forms the basis for their distinct national identity. Many of the chief consequences of the nakba, including the displacement of most Palestinians from their ancestral lands and ongoing statelessness, remain unresolved to this day.

This helps explain the enduring violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which flared up most recently on the border with Gaza. Beginning on March 30, a series of Friday protests billed the “Great March of Return” have seen thousands of mainly unarmed young men confront Israeli forces and border guards. They are blocking these men from the nearby villages, located in what is now Israel, from which many of their families were displaced in the 1940s. At least 85 protesters have died, and well over 5,000 injured, in the unrest. These demonstrations, which will culminate on the 15th, combined with the opening of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, may well become yet another historic flashpoint. And even if the worst does not come to pass this time, sooner or later, it will. Until we come to grips with the political and cultural legacy of the nakba, calm, stability, and normality will elude Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

To understand the nakba is to first confront its sheer scale and totality. Before the nakba, there was a large, deeply rooted, and essentially ancient Arab society in most of what, within a few months, became the Jewish state of Israel. In effect, one day it was there, as it had been for living memory, and the next day it was gone. An entire society, with the exception of relatively small groups in a few places, simply vanished.

After World War I, the League of Nations broke the Ottoman Empire up into territories assigned to different colonial powers. The lands that today constitute Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were placed under British rule, but with two explicit and incompatible purposes: Britain was already committedto supporting the recently established Zionist movement that sought to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The mandate reaffirmed that goal, but did not define what a “national home,” such as a Jewish state, meant in practice.

Yet the terms of the Covenant of the League of Nations held that the purpose of mandates was to secure the “well-being and development” of the people living in those territories. The problem was that just under 90 percent of the population of Palestine in 1922, when the British mandate was formally initiated, were Arab Muslims and Christians, with Jews, in many cases recent arrivals, constituting 11 percent. In other words, the project of providing “tutelage” to the people of the territory and preparing them for independence was at stark odds with the project of transforming Palestine into a “national home for the Jewish people,” however that was defined. In both Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Palestine mandate, the overwhelming Palestinian majority was simply referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” with “civil and religious rights,” but not political ones.

This meant the British colonial overlords were almost always at odds with both the local Arab population, and also frequently with Jewish leaders. But by the time the British Mandate began to fall apart after World War II, the population of the territory had been transformed: 68 percent were Arabs and 32 percent were Jews (about two-thirds of whom were born abroad). The fledgling United Nations proposed to partition the territory between Arabs and Jews, but even in the proposed Jewish state, gerrymandered to include the maximum number of Jews, there was a virtual Arab plurality. Even after decades of immigration, it still wasn’t possible to carve out a significant portion of Palestine with a solid Jewish majority. The Arabs, and especially Palestinians, angrily rejected partition on the grounds that the overwhelming majority of the people of the country did not wish to see their land divided and more than half of it given to the sovereignty of the Jewish minority who, at the time, made up one-third of the population. Many others were expected to arrive at some future date, all against the wishes of the large majority.

Violence between the two communities, and between both and the British authorities, grew common throughout the 1930s and ’40s, including a fully fledged Arab revolt from 1936 to 1939. But as it became clear that Britain was simply going to leave Palestine in 1948, both sides began jockeying for position. Communal violence broke out into open warfare in the fall of 1947. This set the stage for the nakba.

Fighting intensified in January 1948, and the Palestinian exodus began. Up to 100,000 Palestinians, mainly from the upper and middle classes, fled the cities and towns which were the epicenter of the fighting. Until then, expulsions were rare. But in April 1948, the Jewish forces launched a more concerted campaign of massacre and forced displacement, including the notorious Deir Yassin massacreof about 100 Palestinians on April 9. This spread panic among Palestinians, encouraging them to flee.

When terror didn’t do the trick, Palestinians were forced out by Jewish militias. Early April saw the launch of the “Plan Dalet” military campaign, which sought, in part, the ethnic cleansing of most or all of the Arab inhabitants from areas claimed for a Jewish state. As the British withdrew from Palestine in early May 1948, Israel declared its establishment, and the war intensified with the intervention of several Arab armies. The process of Palestinian displacement also intensified. Yitzhak Rabin, then a young Jewish commander, would later write in his memoir of how he was ordered by David Ben-Gurion—literally with the wave of a hand—to “drive out” the 50,000 civilians in the towns of Lydda and Ramla on June 10 and 11.

When the dust settled, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs, perhaps 700,000 to 800,000 people, had either fled or been expelled. The Palestinians who remained in what was now a Jewish state made up around 18 percent of the population of Israel, and for the next 20 years lived under martial law. The society the Palestinians had composed over the centuries was, for the most part, now gone. Towns and villages were renamed or bulldozed. Property was expropriated en masse through various legal mechanisms. And, most importantly, whether Palestinians fled or were expelled, virtually none were allowed to return. Most Palestinians who left their homes in 1947 and 1948 believed they would one day come back when the fighting stopped, no matter what the outcome. This was a complete delusion. They were gone, and the new Israeli state regarded their absence as the godsend that allowed a Jewish-majority country to suddenly emerge.

This, in brief, is the Palestinian nakba, the collapse and disappearance of an entire society that was politically, militarily, and culturally unprepared for the collision with Zionism, colonialism, and war. But the nakba defined, and continues to define, Palestinian national identity.

At the time of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism was running strong. The Muslims and Christians in the territories that were about to become Mandatory Palestine overwhelmingly identified as Arabs, but not yet as an ethno-national Palestinian community. They had warmly welcomed the creation of the first, short-lived, pan-Arab state in 1920, before it was crushed by the French. At that time, many if not most Palestinians saw themselves as Arabs and essentially “southern Syrians.” But once that early Arab state ended, they were, in effect, on their own. They had little choice but to begin defining themselves chiefly as Palestinians.

While Palestinians do have cultural features that distinguish them from other Arabs, it is their history and, above all, the nakba and its never-ending aftermath, that firmly separates them from all other Arabs. All Palestinians, including those left behind in Israel, shared this experience. And given that most Palestinians today are either exiles, refugees, or living under Israeli occupation—or, at best, live as second-class citizens of Israel itself—their collective social, political, and historical identity centers almost entirely around the shattering experience of the nakba. No other group of Arabs endured this.

Historians can and do debate who is at fault for this debacle. But it’s irrefutable that Palestinians didn’t merely lose their putative state and political power. At an individual and familial level, they lost their homes and property, in almost all cases for good. Collectively, they lost their society, and were condemned to live as exiles or stateless subjects under the rule of a foreign military. They had a society, and then they didn’t.

The rupture of the nakba cannot be mended. The state of Israel is a reality that will not disappear. Most Palestinians fetishize the right of return, and from a moral and legal perspective, their case is irrefutable. But politically, there is no chance of any such return, except in tiny, symbolic numbers. After decades of fruitless struggle and brutality on all sides, Palestinians have somewhat bitterly come to accept that the nakba cannot be reversed or even really redressed. They accepted that a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state based in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 living alongside the Jewish state, was the only available outcome. But even that has proven unattainable.

The trauma of the nakba cannot be addressed until the rest of the world, and particularly Israel, recognizes its validity and importance. The event does not compare to the Holocaust—very little else does. But Jews and Palestinians are two peoples both marked by definitive historical traumas that define their worldviews. The difference is that the Jewish and Israeli narratives continue to an epiphany of redemption in the founding and flourishing of the state of Israel, while for Palestinians, permanently dispossessed and living in exile or under occupation, the trauma is enduring and still unfolding.

This is especially true in Gaza, which has become a wretched open-air prison for almost 2 million densely packed residents. The humanitarian crisis and pervasive despair there are so dire that even Israeli security officials regard Gaza as a ticking bomb of human misery. If it does not explode on May 15, it will soon.

Hence the nakba is not so much a historical memory for most Palestinians, as a daily, lived experience. Recognizing that and acting on it will be indispensable for understanding the Palestinian perspective, at long last ending the conflict and the nakba, and allowing Jews and Arabs, and the whole world, to finally move on

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/does-washington-have-the-power-to-prevent-nuclear-weapon-proliferation-1.729707

Trump has adopted two radically different approaches to the same conundrum – both with a terrible incentive structure

By scrapping the Iran nuclear deal and agreeing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, US President Donald Trump is confronting the same basic question: does Washington have the will or ability to prevent another spate of international nuclear weapons proliferation?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of proliferation took place among rising powers like China, Israel and India. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, except for Pakistan, which was catching up with India, the process stopped. Countries that might have gone nuclear like Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina pulled back while South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan abandoned their arsenals.

However, in October 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test and in 2016 tested a warhead and, apparently, a hydrogen device. Iran was probably about a year away from acquiring its own nuclear weapon when it agreed to postpone or mothball its programme in return for sanctions relief under the nuclear deal.

With Iran and North Korea, Mr Trump has adopted two radically different approaches to the same proliferation conundrum.

Right now, there aren’t many non-nuclear powers pursuing their own weapons. But these two rogue regimes wanted them for the same purposes: to increase their regional clout and impunity and to guard against any externally imposed regime change. Both obviously noted that two other so-called rogue regimes that abandoned their special weapons programmes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, no longer exist.

Washington has led concerted international campaigns of sanctions and maximum pressure, intended to force Tehran and Pyongyang to abandon these plans. But efforts to coerce North Korea have failed utterly.

Iran was willing to voluntarily accept the 10-to-15 year delays in the nuclear deal, partly because it wanted to focus on developing much more advanced, domestically produced centrifuges than those it already had. That way, any future charge towards a nuclear breakout would get much further and go significantly faster. Tehran needed time anyway and under the nuclear deal, when its restrictions expire, Iran would be no more than four months from breakout.

For the West, too, the Iran deal was essentially a chronological gamble, hoping Iranian policies, politics or ambitions would change during the period of pause. After all, arms control treaties are political instruments that are strictly enforced – until they’re not. Iran’s voluntary enrichment restrictions could have been extended after – or collapsed before – they expired on paper.

Leaving the Iran deal, Mr Trump is hoping that sanctions, combined with other focused, coercive measures, can produce what amounts to regime change in Tehran. That is wildly implausible. There’s virtually no historical precedent for sanctions producing externally driven regime change anywhere and no evidence that there’s a revolutionary situation brewing inside Iran with merely a shove needed to bring the regime down.

The far greater likelihood is that hardliners will be strengthened, at least inside Iran. A concerted anti-Iranian campaign on many fronts might produce a welcome rollback of Iranian hegemony in the Arab world. But it’s hard to imagine the president who so carefully avoided all Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah targets during the recent Syrian missile strike and wants to pull all US troops out of Syria immediately leading such a campaign.

Even if he did and even if it was successful in rolling back Iranian hegemony, the most likely result is a more hardline regime in Tehran and a mad dash towards nuclear weapons. Tehran obviously wants to do as much business with Europe as it can and try to isolate Washington, which it can’t. So the deal might briefly survive but in a zombie-like living death. When it completely collapses, Iran will rush towards nuclear weapons, just as North Korea did.

That appears to have greatly profited Pyongyang. Mr Kim is now referred to by Mr Trump as “very honourable” and “excellent” and is meeting the American president as an equal, merely in exchange for three hostages.

A cold reading of current reality suggests Iran made a big mistake in postponing its programme while North Korea was wise to charge towards hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles. That’s a terrible incentive structure.

The most Mr Trump is likely to get from Mr Kim won’t be the mothballing and delays Iran accepted but, along with many false pledges, perhaps a real commitment not to build a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental US. But that won’t stop regional proliferation with Japan and possibly South Korea eventually moving in the nuclear direction. When Iran revives its nuclear programme, neighbours like Saudi Arabia will, as it has said, need to follow suit.

Regime change isn’t a realistic goal. It requires actions on the scale of the Iraq invasion of 2003. Nothing less ever works. That’s almost impossible to imagine in Iran and even more implausible in North Korea.

Mr Trump is flinging honey at North Korea and vinegar at Iran in pursuit of the same non-proliferation goal. In both cases, there’s no sign of any practical plan B, other than old-fashioned containment. Proliferation might ultimately prove unavoidable, unless Mr Trump is ready for some very big wars. Even if he is, the American people certainly aren’t.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-11/iraq-elections-are-sure-to-leave-a-mess

Don’t expect a functional government to emerge from a rancid stew of bad law and divisive politics.

After the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the military flareup between Iran and Israel along the Syrian border, national elections in Iraq this weekend will be a crucial test of Iran’s regional influence. But the election will also unfold under the largely unrecognized but ominous shadow of one of the worst electoral court rulings anywhere in recent history.

Iraq’s electoral law is a complex and idiosyncratic method of securing proportional representation in Parliament. The system tends to favor the largest parties and solid voting blocs using a process so arcane that virtually no one outside of professional politicians and statisticians really understands how it works.

That’s bad enough. Even worse is that under existing Iraqi judicial rulings, the most meaningful politics take place after the voting.

Two elections back, in 2010, the incumbent Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shiite Islamist, was narrowly defeated by a secular coalition led by the former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi, a nonsectarian Shiite whose al-Iraqiyya coalition included many Sunnis, got 91 seats in Parliament as opposed to 89 for the Maliki coalition. The next largest group had 70.

Most observers assumed that Allawi would therefore be granted the first opportunity to form a government. But for their own strategic reasons, the two dominant foreign powers in Iraq – the U.S. and Iran – both wanted a second term for Maliki.

After numerous legal machinations, including the attempted disqualification of several of Allawi’s candidates, a formula to keep him in power was finally discovered. On March 25, the federal Supreme Court of Iraq issued Opinion 25 of 2010 putting a novel gloss on Article 76 of the Constitution.

The court ruled that right to form a government did not automatically go to the largest electoral coalition, as it does in virtually all countries with parliamentary systems. Instead, the court said, it could go to a bloc that could assemble the largest coalition after the election. On this basis and because neither side had won an outright majority, Maliki, with the backing of the U.S. and Iran, was given the first opportunity and retained his grip on power.

The result was a disaster. The administration of President Barack Obama was mystifyingly determined to stick with Maliki, claiming there were no other real options. Iran also pushed for him to stay in power because of his sectarian Shiite policies and slavishly pro-Iranian attitudes. His second term destroyed the gains of the U.S. military surge against al-Qaeda in Iraq and fueled the rise of Islamic State in Sunni-majority areas of the country.

Maliki’s coalition won the most seats in the 2014 election, but he was so discredited that many of his onetime supporters abandoned him, including the U.S. and Iran.

Using this same ruling, they turned to the current prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who seemingly came from nowhere after the vote. He has emerged as a nationally oriented politician who alone is fielding candidates this year in all Iraqi provinces. Because he managed to undo some of the worst sectarian excesses of Maliki and presided over the defeat of Islamic State, he is expected to win the biggest bloc in Parliament.

However, because of the 2010 ruling, which is still in effect, unless a coalition wins an outright majority, or something very close, the real politics will begin after the voting as politicians scramble to construct the largest possible parliamentary bloc.

The political distortions are obvious. Any group, for example, that wants to camouflage the range of moderates and extremists in its own midst could simply divide before the election, only to reunite immediately afterwards. It becomes easy for all kinds of wolves to don sheep costumes during the election. Parliamentary politics naturally lend themselves to baroque machinations, but this invitation to post-election maneuvering is remarkable and dangerous.

This year that ruling is likely to prove especially problematic because of the extreme level of political fragmentation in Iraq following the collapse of Islamic State.

In the last three elections, the U.S. and Iran both supported Maliki during his two terms and then together turned to Abadi. But because Abadi has adopted a more independent and nonsectarian stance, Iran no longer supports him. Indeed, leaders of Tehran’s ultra-sectarian Iraqi Shiite militia proxies are posing a major electoral challenge.

Iraqi politics are now highly fragmented not only between, but within, sectarian and ethnic communities. There’s virtually no chance of anyone coming close to a parliamentary majority. And because of President Donald Trump’s vow to confront Iran throughout the region, the U.S. and Iran will certainly not be backing the same candidate this time.

The 2010 ruling is likely to make the process of forming a government even longer, more contentious, and more disconnected from the public will. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia, a growing presence in Iraq, will be pitted against an angry and defensive Iran in a fight for influence. From this mess, someone will eventually cobble together a majority, but it is likely to be a dysfunctional crazy quilt of rivals and enemies opposed by Iran, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

The only good news is that because Iraq follows a French rather than an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, overturning the terrible 2010 legal precedent would be relatively easy. Until that happens, Iraqi politics will be haunted by many demons, including its own Supreme Court’s blunder.

http://www.agsiw.org/gulf-leaders-welcome-jcpoa-withdrawal-but-plan-b-remains-unclear/

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/why-an-attempt-to-fix-not-nix-the-iran-nuclear-deal-with-the-help-of-europe-is-trump-s-only-sensible-option-1.727416

Will Donald Trump walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, as he has threatened, on May 12? In these pages, I explained why it is in his interests to instead craft a new deal with the European signatories and claim to have “fixed” the Iran agreement. However, many signs suggest he’s determined to definitively reject it. That could all be misdirection – or fair warning.

Most conversations now hinge on the binary question of whether Mr Trump will “fix or nix” the Iran nuclear agreement. But in practice he has a wide range of options for rejecting the deal.

Mr Trump has already “decertified” the agreement by declining to assure Congress that the Iran deal is satisfying four provisions of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. On January 13 and April 13, he withheld such certification, an act that allows Congress to use expedited procedures to quickly reimpose sanctions (which would be a material breach of US commitments under the deal). But Congress hasn’t done that, so the US, like Iran, is still in compliance.

If Mr Trump asked Republicans in Congress to reimpose sanctions on Iran, they certainly would. But he can also act on his own by declining to renew various sanctions waivers, issuing new executive orders to reinstate earlier orders that were revoked to implement the nuclear agreement, or issuing new sanctions through entirely novel executive orders.

Despite his constant threats, Mr Trump has consistently renewed waivers on Iranian sanctions whenever they have come up. However, on January 12, he insisted he wouldn’t do that again unless the agreement was “fixed” to answer his various criticisms. Next Saturday’s date is crucial because it’s the next time certain waivers – those on a 120-day schedule – must be renewed. Other waivers on a 180-day schedule, are due to expire in mid-July.

If he lets any of these waivers expire, key US sanctions will automatically “snap back” into effect, putting Washington in material breach of the agreement with Tehran.

Mr Trump could also use provisions of the agreement itself to walk away. Paragraph 36 outlines a dispute resolution mechanism and states that “if the complaining participant deems the issue to constitute significant non-performance, then that participant could treat the unresolved issue as grounds to cease performing its commitments”. Mr Trump could present the International Atomic Energy Agency and others with “credible and accurate information” involving an “uncured material breach” by Iran and effectively sink the whole deal.

Such an action could only be blocked by the UN Security Council but the US could simply veto any such resolution. Since all the evidence suggests Iran is complying, this path would greatly exacerbate the diplomatic and political costs of a US withdrawal by (probably unsuccessfully) attempting to force other parties, including Europeans, Russia and China, to reimpose the old multilateral sanctions on what they will undoubtedly regard as spurious grounds.

If Mr Trump chooses instead to reimpose unilateral US sanctions, either on his own or through Congress, that, too, will not be simple. His team will have to undo all the administrative de-listing of Iranian entities that was needed to implement the agreement, reimpose revoked sanctions, decide if any new Iranian entities will be included and determine what penalties would apply to US and international violators.

This is where Mr Trump’s decision becomes most complex. If the United States withdraws from the agreement but re-institutes only a small range of sanctions on non-essential Iranian entities and, especially, does not try to penalise European and other international entities doing business with Iran’s core institutions, the nuclear deal could, at least for a time, survive a US rejection. But what would be the point of such a theatrical, hollow exercise?

If, on the other hand, the Trump administration re-sanctioned key Iranian entities such as the Central Bank of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, Iran Air and the National Iranian Oil Company, and attempts to unilaterally enforce third-party sanctions against European entities doing business with Iran, there is little chance that Iran would continue with the agreement. And under such circumstances, there is a high likelihood that Britain, Germany and France, not to mention Russia and China, would blame Washington entirely – and Tehran not at all – for the agreement’s collapse.

It’s hard to imagine how a new round of sanctions can really be effective without US coordination with European and other powers, which would also require a clear understanding of what goals are being pursued. Simply trying to give everyone a binary choice of either doing business with the United States or Iran might be a disaster for Tehran but won’t prove much of a win for Washington either.

If he’s going to scrap the deal, Mr Trump must have a sophisticated plan B for how to alter Iran’s calculations and behaviour. To be effective, that new approach will require international coordination and successfully persuading, not trying to force, other powers to cooperate with it. Which brings us back to the inescapable conclusion: an agreement with the Europeans to “fix” and not “nix” the “worst deal ever” is the only sensible move.