Inside Iraq's Confessional Politics

Abstract

After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, a steady stream of books appeared analyzing the situation in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion. In this, the first book by a former member of the new Iraqi government, Ali A. Allawi provides a detailed account of Iraq’s history since the 1990 Gulf War and of Iraqi society and politics after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Allawi was Iraq’s first postwar civilian minister of defense and later minister of finance under Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He was elected to the Transitional National Assembly in 2005 as a member of the (Shia) United Iraqi Alliance and now serves as an advisor to current premier Nuri al-Maliki. Allawi’s various positions in the Iraqi government, as well as his prewar role in Shia-exile Iraqi politics, give him a unique perspective on the Iraqi political landscape and, in particular, on Iraqi Shi’ism. Unlike others who have written insider accounts and memoirs, Allawi never tries to psychoanalyze the key players. Instead he writes in a dispassionate and at times even distant prose—writing about himself in the third person, for example—that evokes an earlier style of Arabic autobiographical writing. His book critically addresses nearly everything from the rise of the Iraqi opposition to L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to the present-day Maliki government. While Allawi’s critique of U.S. policy in Iraq and of Iraqi politics is not new, his account of political Islam in Iraq is. One of Allawi’s overarching themes is the commanding sociopolitical role played in Iraq by Islam—be it the Twelver