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COMMENTARY
Dangerous illusions of a
democratic Shi'ite Iraq
By Marc
Erikson
Iraqi Shiite leader, the Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani, demands "one man (hopefully one person),
one vote" general elections soonest to determine who
will rule Iraq after the Americans and other occupying
powers return the country to a measure of sovereignty
and self-rule by end-June as promised.
In
varying degrees, several influential American
conservatives close to (and in) the Bush administration
apparently agree and see in Sistani and the majority
Shi'ites (some 60 percent of the Iraqi population) the
last best hope for a democratic Iraq, a democratizing
Middle East, and a successful outcome for American
intervention. I am afraid such hopes and expectations
are ill-founded and not supported by the historical
record or present-day realities.
A sample
neo-conservative opinion is Reuel Marc Gerecht's, a
former Central Intelligence Agency operative and now a
resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
who wrote in Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard on
December 22: "If the Bush administration is wise, it
will change its provisional-government plans and allow
for direct elections as soon as feasible. If it refuses
to change, and Sistani and the Shi'ites force it to
abort the plan later, we will be left weaker than if we
change now ... Though many in the CPA [Coalition
Provisional Authority] and the administration may want
to wish Sistani away, fortunately they can't. He is
America's most powerful democratic weapon in Iraq, even
if we don't know how to wield him." Gerecht adds: "If
all goes well with Iraq's Shi'ites, the eventual spread
of democracy throughout the Middle East becomes a real
possibility. If the Shi'ites go south on us, then the
Middle East's next 'Liberal Age' ... will likely be a
long time coming."
A February 5 Wall Street
Journal editorial, "Why not elections", chimed in with
such opinion. It acknowledged concerns that "elections
could mean 'one man, one vote, once'," but went on to
say: "There are risks no matter what the US does, and we
think this fear [of an election leading to Iranian-style
clerical rule] misjudges both the Shi'ite majority and
especially Ayatollah Sistani."
Already prior to
the war, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
had voiced high expectations for a Shi'ite-ruled Iraq,
telling National Public Radio on February 19 last year:
"The Iraqi population is completely different ... The
Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab
world. They are by and large quite secular. They are
overwhelmingly Shi'ite, which is different from the
Wahhabis of the peninsula. They don't bring the
sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam on their
territory."
Let's quickly dispense with
Wolfowitz's "no holy cities" nonsense. Najaf and Karbala
south of Baghdad are the cities where the cousin and
son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, Ali, and his son
Husain (the Prophet's grandson), to whom the Shi'ite
branch of Islam traces its origins, were martyred. The
shrines housing their tombs are the Shi'ites' most
sacred places. But more damaging than loose talk from
ignorance to Wolfowitz's and others' expectations for -
more accurately, illusions of - a Shi'ite-led Iraq at
the core of a democratizing Middle East are recent
historical facts, factional alignments in the Shi'ite
community, and regional-strategic circumstances.
Let's look at the strategic issues first. Iraq's
immediate neighbor, Shi'ite Iran, has a population of 67
million and one of the world's highest birth rates. A
Shi'ite-controlled Iraq would be a natural ally to form
a population bloc of well over 80 million. Jointly, they
would sit on one of the world's largest oil reserves and
could wield the type of power of which the
long-oppressed Iraqi Shi'ites have long dreamed.
Would this combine prove a pillar of a
democratizing Middle East as hoped for? Would the
putative "quite secular" Shi'ites or followers of
moderate cleric Sistani exercise their influence to help
abolish mullah rule in Iran? Asking the questions, I
believe, as good as answers them.
The Iranian
mullahs have proved once again over the past several
weeks that they are hardly on their way out. They
disqualified en masse electoral candidates not to their
liking. Against the protest of impotent reformers, they
decreed that parliamentary elections would be held
anyway. Predictably, the elections returned a
conservative majority to do the mullahs' bidding.
As for the Iraqi Shi'ites, they are certainly
not the secular/moderate lot unified behind "democrat"
Sistani they are often portrayed to be. The "quietist"
senior Najaf ayatollah's pre-eminence is of quite recent
vintage, dating back to 1999, when the more politically
engaged Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, leaning toward
Iranian-style clerical rule, was assassinated (along
with two sons) on the direct orders of Saddam Hussein's
son Uday. Muhammad's surviving son Muqtada al-Sadr, age
31, is a more radical exponent of his father's beliefs
and teachings. In 1999, he went underground and
continued the effort of organizing the impoverished and
oppressed Shi'ites of Najaf, Kufa and the slums of East
Baghdad his father had started. The "Sadr movement" has
some 2 million adherents and demonstrated its clout and
political-religious creed when - on April 10 last year -
it organized the mob that killed the American-backed
Ayatollah Abd al-Majid al-Khoei, flown into Najaf from
exile in London. After the killing, the mob surrounded
the home of Sistani and demanded he leave Najaf
forthwith. Only quick mobilization of Sistani followers
prevented the ayatollah's expulsion or worse.
But the aggressive and authoritarian Sadr
movement is by no means the only anti-democratic Shi'ite
grouping aiming to establish an Iranian-style Islamic
republic in Iraq. Factions of the al-Da'wa Party,
founded in 1957 on the precepts of its theorist Muhammad
Baqir al-Sadr, aspire to the same goal - though
al-Sadr's teachings are at variance with the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini's notion of the "guardianship of the
jurisprudent", which requires that a clerical
jurisprudent aided by clerical guardians should exercise
supreme power in the Islamic state. (Khomeini,
incidentally, developed his theory of clerical rule
while in exile in Najaf from 1964-1978.)
In
1979, after Khomeini had taken power in Iran and his
ideas and influence in Iraq spread, the Ba'ath Party
regime of Saddam started a campaign of brutal repression
of Shi'ite parties and extermination of their leaders.
Al-Sadr was executed in 1980; the al-Da'wa Party was
outlawed, large numbers of its members were arrested,
tortured, and killed. Yet the party survived, in the
form of underground cells in Iraq and groups of exiles
in Iran and the United Kingdom.
The Iran-based
branch was reinforced by thousands of the over 200,000
Shi'ite refugees from Iraq. For a while in the 1980s it
made common cause with the pro-Khomeini terrorist
"Islamic Jihad", which operated in Lebanon. There were
connections as well to the Iranian Hezbollah. The Iraqi
al-Da'wa cells played a leading role in the post-Gulf
War 1991 uprising against Saddam and were decimated. The
small London branch joined joined Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress (INC) in 1992, but split from it in
1995.
Similar twists, turns and splits have
affected the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI), founded in Iran in 1982 as an umbrella
organization for groups aiming to overthrow the Saddam
regime. Al-Da'wa first joined, then split from it. SCIRI
later spawned the paramilitary Badr Brigade, which -
with Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard weapons and
training - grew into the Badr Corps of 8,000-10,000 in
the years just prior to the Iraq war. At the outset of
the war, as the corps positioned in Iran just across the
border with northern Iraq, US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld issued a strong warning to it to refrain from
intervention. Since the war's end, however, the Badr
Corps has established bases in several Iraqi provinces
and functions as an armed militia for the SCIRI.
Though in the past (and continuing into the
present) these varied Shi'ite groups have nearly as
often been at each other's throats as at the Ba'athists,
they share a radical Islamic outlook more akin to
Khomeini's or the current Iranian supremo Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's than Sistani's. I consider it a
dangerous illusion that - after a putative electoral
victory of Shi'ites under Sistani's leadership - the
likes of Muqtada al-Sadr or al-Da'wa and Badr Corps
leaders and their followers could be smoothly integrated
into a peaceable Shi'ite political body leading a
unified, democratic Iraq. Quite understandably, with
thousands of their former comrades in arms buried in
Saddam's mass graves, hatred for the once Ba'ath
Party-led Sunni minority runs deep, as do motives of
revenge and retribution. In the long run, more
importantly, these radicals will not foreswear the ideas
for which many of them have fought for decades. With a
popular following and armed to the teeth, why should
they subordinate their goals and aspirations to those of
a weaker leader's? Badr Corps commander Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim spelled out the strategy quite clearly: first
have elections, in which Shi'ites under moderate
leadership win an absolute majority; then use popular
pressure and force transformation into a Khomeini-style
Islamic republic. It's the old Leninist two-stage
strategy by the precepts of which the Bolsheviks seized
power in Russia in 1917 after intermittent moderate
Menshevik rule under Alexandr Kerenski.
What's
the upshot of these considerations? The relatively
unified, in religious and political terms moderate, and
modestly pro-American, pro-democracy Shi'ite bloc on
which to build Iraq's political future does not exist. A
government formed by a Shi'ite parliamentary majority
elected in early national polls would quickly either
become radicalized or be pushed aside by radical Shi'ite
groups attempting to institute an Islamic republic. At
that point, the country would either split or become
embroiled in civil war leading to a split.
Modern Iraq was created at the end of World War
I, when the British Colonial Office merged the provinces
of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra of the defeated Ottoman
Empire into one political entity, which emerged as an
independent nation in 1932. It was as arbitrary a
creation as Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia after the
defeat of the Hapsburg Empire. It may yet, and perhaps
not unreasonably so, meet the same fate. If for some
reason such fate is deemed undesirable by the present
occupying powers or neighboring countries - the US may
not look kindly on the prospect of a greater Shi'ite
realm centered on Iran; Turkey may not welcome the
prospect of an independent Kurdish entity that could
prove a powerful magnet for the unification of all
ethnic Kurds into one nation - an election scenario that
returns a Shi'ite majority unrestrained by
constitutional power-sharing provisions with Sunnis and
Kurds will have to be shelved. Only a constituent
assembly selected separately by the
ethnically/religiously separate components of the Iraqi
population jointly working out a federalist constitution
with far-reaching autonomy provisions has any chance of
maintaining a unified Iraq.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
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