More than the sun shines in Baghdad

It was cold and rainy in Baghdad yesterday–I mean 40s F and it seemed to rain every time I stepped inside, which was fortunate.  Lots of mud.  Not nice.

Today is a good deal brighter, sunnier and more representative of the political mood.  People here feel things are looking up:  they are hoping their “national partnership” government (Maliki 2) will be an improvement over Maliki 1, even if they are too realistic and experienced to expect much in the way of quick change.  Checkpoints, and some of the 12-foot high T walls that protect so much in the Green Zone, are coming down.  It will take time before it makes much of an impact, but there is even some street cleaning going on, and garbage pickup by men in uniform with reflective vests on.

Everyday life has gotten back to something like normal.  The kids go off to school, the Minister of the Interior (which is how some people refer to a wife!) stays home, the breadwinners go off to do battle with public transport and massive traffic jams, caused by a flood of imported cars since the fall of Saddam Hussein.  Police get some respect from ordinary people, if not from the wealthy and powerful.  Ministry employees are being told they need to show up for work or lose their salaries.  None of this will sound like much to people outside conflict zones, but it represents what I have come to recognize as the fondest dream of people inside conflict zones:  to live a normal, violence-free existence.

Of course it is not trouble-free, or really even violence free.  Yesterday a rocket or mortar fell in the road near the Al Rasheed Hotel, now closed for renovations.  There are fewer “improvised explosive devices,” but there is a wave of (often not publicized) targeted killings of key members of the security forces with silencer-equipped pistols.  No one seems to know who is behind the current violence.  Ba’athists?  Al Qaeda? Iran?  They are labels chosen depending on the politics of the person you are talking to you rather than any hard information about the actual perpetrators, who however are a good deal less inclined to random killing than in the past.  That is some comfort to ordinary people.

At this stage in a society emerging from conflict, corruption becomes a big issue.  And so it has here in Iraq, where Maliki 2 is said to have given firm instructions to his cabinet to clean up.  We’ll see how effective that will be, but the emergence of corruption as a big issue is a good sign.  People complain less about corruption when mass murder is occurring several times a day.

The one politician with a lot to complain about these days, I imagine, is Iyad Allawi, who still sits outside the tent while all the main leaders of his Iraqiyya coalition have scurried inside to occupy much-coveted ministerial positions.  There is little movement on the legislation that would create the National Council on Strategic Policies, the watchdog group he is slated to chair.  Even the Iraqiyya-proposed version of the legislation includes an 80 per cent majority requirement for the Council’s decisions to be binding. That won’t be easy to get.

Meanwhile, the prime minister still controls the main security portfolios, though I understand that he yesterday named Sheikh Faleh Fayyadh, a distinguished associate of former prime minister Ibrahim Jaffari to the important position of minister of state for national security.  Maliki also met today with Kuwait’s Prime Minister, Nasser al-Ahmed al-Subah, in Baghdad.  That is more significant than it sounds, since Maliki has been critical of the Kuwaitis and tough-minded in seeking resolution of several difficult bilateral issues.

Normalizing Iraq’s relationships with mostly Sunni Arab neighbors is challenging for Maliki, who has been viewed negatively in Riyadh and other capitals.  Kuwait would be a good start.  Maliki is also hoping to convince the Arab League, whose secretary general was here the past few days, that it can hold its March meeting in Baghdad.  The big challenge is logistics and facilities, which just don’t look adequate, but the Iraqis are capable of amazing things when they set their minds to it.  The prime minister’s guest house, which I mentioned in a previous post, looks finished from the outside.

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