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COMMENTARY
December 8, 2004
The Shia party
We now know not only that there will be an election in Iraq on Jan. 30th but who is going to win it. This is because a single party slate has been assembled out of the various Shia factions to contest it; and the Shia are three-fifths of Iraq's population. In defiance of any advice I might have given the electoral system cuts several Gordian knots by making the whole of Iraq into a single constituency. It is thus a radical system of proportional representation in which each party will be assigned seats according to its share of the overall vote. The 275-seat National Assembly will thus be filled by party list each member owing everything to the party that put him high enough on its list to get elected though alas nothing to constituents voting for him directly. This was arguably the necessary position to start given the fait accompli of an Iraq that must be held together as one country -- instead of split into its component regional parts at the cost of more bloodshed. The advantage is that by voting along ethnic and religious lines Kurds Arab Sunnis Arab Shia and possibly even smaller groups will be assured of some representation. The disadvantage is that the single party of the Shia majority could rule without having to consult any of the others. But if democracy in any form can survive we must wait for the subtleties to evolve. For now just having a government with a popular mandate however ethnically defined is such a revolutionary innovation for the Arab world that quibbling is out of place. For the fact that Iraq's large Shia majority go from decades of victimhood to power by an electoral process sends in itself a note of thunder across the region. It does so in a way that is ultimately fairly safe from a U.S. and Western point of view. The Shia of Iraq have beyond some residual gratitude for their liberation no overriding reason to love America. But they have every reason to grasp that America is not their enemy. The threats to a quiet life come from two more immediate sources: 1. the now disempowered Arab Sunnis who persecuted them under Saddam Hussein many of whom support the attempt to recover their hegemony through Jihad massacres and terrorism; and 2. Revolutionary Iran next door. Iran may also be Shia but its current government represents a failed essay in Islamist fanaticism that has long since lost the support of its people. Moreover even at the height of Ayatollah Khomenei's charismatic appeal Saddam could count on the national loyalties of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia troops he impressed into his war against Iran from 1980 to 1988. I do not know of a single knowledgeable observer who doubts that "Iraqi Shia" and "Iranian Shia" are distinct propositions. The good news is that this Iraqi Shia majority have been persuaded to buy into the election in a big way. The Shia mullahs are now spouting "get out and vote" from pulpits across the south and middle of Iraq and as of tomorrow their slate is fielded. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani working always at one distance through agents and advisers not merely from personal style but from an essentially Shia notion of preserving polite distance between spiritual and worldly issues has forged this single party out of a broad range of Shia interests and dispositions. And while the names have not yet been publicly released I understand they include for good measure at least token Sunni Arabs Sunni Kurds and even a Christian to provide other regional voices within the ("United Iraqi Alliance") party. Sistani has also used his influence to keep clerics off the list which is overwhelmingly secular and includes a sprinkling of plausible technocrats. He has further completed the co-optation of Moqtada al-Sadr's blackshirt followers by running a modest selection of radicals but not al-Sadr nor any of his inner circle themselves. The Shia are thus taking care of their own "evil genies" in their own way -- by means of a very Arab internal reconciliation that would strike most Western observers as na?ve. But different things work in different cultures and in this case the sheer prestige of Sistani and the "spiritual aristocracy" should indeed pacify the hottest heads who would turn their guns against "Americans and their servants" but not against their own betters. The Bush administration is still in the act of imposing democracy on two Muslim states. What it cannot do especially over time is determine the evolution of those democracies. Nor will it be any business of the U.S. so long as regimes that result do not again threaten the West or their neighbours. We have deus ex machina but from this point the native Arab genius for finding accommodations may play with the machine -- as an alternative to playing with aircraft and carbombs. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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