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COMMENTARY
January 17, 2004
Trouble
Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani Iraq's highest-ranking Shia cleric has begun seriously throwing his weight around in Iraq helping to organize a demonstration in Basra yesterday of tens of thousands of Shia faithful to chant "No to America!" and demand immediate mass elections -- in a country which has not had a reliable census in several decades and where the infrastructure for a fair general election does not yet exist. Raising the temperature further the second-ranking Shia cleric Hojat Al-Islam Ali Abdulhakim Alsafi has written a sarcastic public letter to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that is being read in all the mosques. The Shia of Iraq are not an homogenous and discrete ethnic group. Most are racially and linguistically Arab which alone distinguishes them from the Shia of Iran. While their numbers are overwhelming in the southern third of Iraq they may be found everywhere; and among Arab Iraqis there is some degree of shading between Shia and Sunni sects. Unknown but very large proportions are not religious; and the tribal orders of the countryside break down in Basra and other large cities. And not all the devoted pay their respects to Ayatollah Sistani. Nevertheless Sistani has more prestige than anyone in Iraq and when he commands the faithful to take to the streets his orders are echoed in the Friday prayers and reinforced by stick-wielding zealots. More fundamentally power corrupts. I fear that Iraq's Shia clerics and their camp followers have only begun to get a taste of power and their appetite for it will grow quickly as they acquire more. This in a country with no experience of give-and-take no machinery of checks and balances -- things which take decades or centuries to grow and require stability. This is evident in Ayatollah Sistani's own proclamations. He began by counselling Iraqis to co-operate with U.S. and British troops and by declaring that he had no political aspirations. While he still plays the role of a purely religious leader he has surrounded himself with political operatives. His demands have become more strident and are now coupled with threats. He adds new demands to further increase the pressure: most recently saying that the snap election must be combined with a referendum on whether U.S. troops should be allowed to stay. The U.S. position is constrained thrice over. 1. Since the Iraqi people were not defeated but liberated from a tyrant by the U.S. invasion the U.S. does not have the luxury of dictating to the conquered. 2. Since it refused to install the secular-Shia Ahmed Chalabi as an "Iraqi Karzai" for moderate forces to rally around it has left the Shia clerics to fish the whole pool. 3. The Bush administration further gave away its key wild-card trading position. It has publicly declared it will not consider breaking the country into three or more constituent national parts (say Kurdistan a Sunni-majority "Upper Mesopotamia" and a Shia-majority "Lower Mesopotamia"). The threat of this last would be the natural trump against a Shia power-play. It could become a threat regardless for the Shia clerical muscle-flexing is already making the Kurdish leadership feel claustrophobic. They have had the pleasure of governing themselves and have done a good job of creating a fairly open and prosperous society in the part of Iraq that was put under the protection of the allied no-fly zone after the Gulf War. They are powerfully allergic to mullahs whose sense of reality is evaporating. And the Sunni Triangle which the American soldiers are finally getting under control (violent incidents and casualties dropping week by week) could suddenly re-erupt as people who did well out of Saddam Hussein's tribal Sunni dictatorship contemplate the prospect of the U.S. delivering the country into the hands of their most lethal enemies. They know the Americans won't massacre them; but they also know that the Shia have scores to settle with them. Their solution has always been strike first. Paul Bremer the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq is currently in the States with a delegation of the Iraqi governing council under its present rotating chairman Adnan Pachachi. While Mr. Bremer again consults anxiously with the White House on what to do Mr. Pachachi is leading an American-backed Iraqi appeal to the United Nations in New York to please get involved in the Iraqi transition. Once again U.N. cover is wanted to take some of the heat off the U.S. But as we've seen in the past the last thing the U.N. wants to do is to be helpful. The Bush administration has pulled off so many miracles in Iraq so far that they should not be counted out for another. But they are now playing with a bad hand against people who anyway cheat at poker. They have no motive to raise the stakes; the trick now is to cut their losses. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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