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COMMENTARY
November 29, 2003
Bush in bazaar
President Bush's drop-in to Baghdad for American Thanksgiving has been rightly reported as a propaganda stunt -- a good one building morale among beleaguered and homesick U.S. forces and giving America itself a self-confident boost. But his principal accomplishment during the two-and-a-half hours he was on the ground has gone mostly below radar. In a brief meeting with four senior and representative members of the provisional Iraqi Governing Council he seems to have broken a logjam. The problem for the U.S. is to be able to hand over full sovereign power to an elected Iraqi government by July 1st of next year with a "status of forces" agreement guaranteeing the continuing presence of U.S. troops to provide background security. Now Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani the authoritative spokesman for Iraq's majority Shia population had already laid down conditions for the vote which the U.S. State Department was too slow to comprehend. They should have been listening some months ago because Sistani's prestige gives him a working veto over all plans. In this case the U.S. had assumed an indirect election would decide the next government conducted in 18 regional caucuses. But Sistani was insisting on a full direct popular ballot. That sounds nice until you realize it is physically impossible. Iraq's last census was in 1998. It is unreliable. It will take about two years to do a new one; and a census is necessary as the basis of a legitimate voters' roll. But that's thinking Western-style. As Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who is Sistani's hand within the Governing Council has since insisted an emergency list can be created by using the old U.N. ration coupon records as a point of departure for a knock-down census that gathers only what is needed to assemble those voters' rolls. This too will be nearly impossible to complete by June but hey. Worse the Americans feared the rush could lead to "a mosque election" in which the clerics tell the faithful how to vote. But this is the same as saying that Iraq is not yet ready for democracy -- and of course it's not. No matter how you cut it a mosque election is what you're going to get. Sistani's other requirements are easier to meet but again not as easy as they sound. The draft constitution must acknowledge the Islamic faith and not be in conflict with it (same story as Afghanistan). And U.S. troops should be withdrawn from all civil patrols before the government handover. (They would like nothing better.) Since the Americans are training Iraqi police as fast as they can the question is once again only one of time. Naturally the Kurds are suspicious of Shia posturing and the Sunni representatives are suspicious of everyone. They tend to wait and see what the U.S. will do before playing their own hands against Sistani's. However the current rotating President Jalal Talabani who leads one of the two large Kurdish factions travelled to Najaf to confer directly with Sistani immediately after the "night journey" encounter at Baghdad airport with President Bush. Nothing but good seemed to come of it and the Governing Council would now seem to be bargaining again with everything on the table. So what did Mr. Bush do? It would seem that he personally delivered the rhetorical "Whatever!" to break an impasse. The principals had to hear from him directly that in effect Iraq is their problem to solve and not Mr. Bush's; that the latter now accepts the new Iraqi democracy is not going to be very Western-looking because it can't be. It will instead resemble something hatched in an Iraqi bazaar; and the U.S. will remain to make sure that nothing worse happens. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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