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THE ROVING EYE
The
Shi'ites' Faustian pact
By
Pepe Escobar
In Najaf, the holy Shi'ite
city, the grand ayatollahs are busy advancing a
religious agenda: Ali al-Sistani, Mohammad Ishaq
al-Fayad, Bashir al-Najafi and Mohammad Said Hakim
compose the al-marja' iyyah (source
of infallible authority on all religious matters).
They are unanimous: the Shi'ite religious parties,
the big winners in the elections, must implement
Sharia (Islamic) law - and in fact this is one of
the parties' top priorities. This does not 
mean
that Sistani wants - or needs - to control an
Iraqi theocracy: it means that the Shi'ite
religious parties themselves - led by secular
people - will give birth to an Iraqi Islamic
republic.
Sistani's representatives have
been stressing in the past few days that what
matters for the grand ayatollah is equal rights
for all. According to his senior aide, Mohammad
al-Haboubi, the top priority in the writing of the
future Iraqi constitution is "the preservation of
the rights of all citizens, majority or minority,
so they are all equal in the eyes of the law".
Most Shi'ite scholars insist the Americans
must stay away from the writing of the new
constitution. Whether the Americans like it or
not, Sharia law will prevail over civil law.
What's left is a matter of degree: how deep will
Sharia in Iraq rule over everything - apart from
stating that women may not shake hands with men,
music is allowed only "if it is not for enjoyment"
and daughters inherit less than sons?
Sistani will have the last word as far as
who will be the new Iraqi prime minister, not to
mention the turbulent process of drafting the
permanent constitution. He will refuse to allow
the Kurds a veto power over the constitution -
something they already have thanks to an
administrative law passed by the Americans.
Baghdad sources confirm that a key reason for
Sistani to "bless" the Shi'ite-dominated United
Iraqi Alliance (UIA) was that he was assured a
primordial role in drafting the constitution.
Moreover, Sistani himself is infinitely more
popular and respected than the two main Shi'ite
parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Da'wa Party.
For the majority of Sunnis and even for some
secular Shi'ites, they are Iranian agents: during
the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the SCIRI was on
Iran's side, ie against Saddam. Without Sistani's
"blessing", these parties would never have been
voted for en masse on January 30.
What
about all that oil?
Abdel Mahdi, currently
the finance minister and a member of the SCIRI,
remains a strong contender for prime minister,
alongside Ibrahim al-Jafaari of Da'wa.
On December 22, Mahdi - with US
Under Secretary of State Alan Larson by his side -
told the National Press Club in Washington in so
many words, and to the delight of corporate
US oil majors, that a new oil law would
privatize Iraq's oil industry. The new law would
allow investment in both downstream and "maybe
even upstream" operations, meaning foreigners
could become de facto owners of Iraqi oilfields.
No wonder Mahdi has been touted by US corporate
media as the next best candidate for prime
minister after "the Americans' man", former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset and
current Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Apart
from an item by Inter Press Service at the time,
Antonia Juhasz, a Foreign Policy in Focus scholar
currently writing a book about the economic
invasion of Iraq, has been the only one to sound
alarm bells: Is it possible that Washington has
made a deal - oil for power - with the SCIRI?
This is the fine print that President
George W Bush's freedom rhetoric does not cover.
Iraq may have a new "elected" National Assembly
and a new Iraqi constitution may be written in the
next few months. But the fact is that during 2005
the US remains in total control. Follow the money:
US$24 billion funded by American taxpayers toward
the reconstruction, plus all the rules that have
been passed by the US that control Iraq's economy,
plus the military occupation.
Both
the billions
of dollars and the maze of rules are controlled
by auditors sitting in every Iraqi ministry
for five years, all of them appointed (and
controlled) by the Americans. The only thing that
the Bush administration does not control in Iraq
is unlimited, no-holds-barred access to oil - which
anyone familiar with Vice President Dick Cheney's
world view knows to be the key reason for
the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The whole point of an indefinite,
muscular US military presence in Iraq (14 military bases,
more than 100,000 troops, the massive embassy
in Baghdad, the CIA-trained "Salvador option"
death squads) would be to protect US corporate
interests in the oil industry. But the possibility
of a law privatizing Iraq's oil coming to pass
under a UIA-dominated government is less than zero
- for two main reasons. In terms of Iraqi
nationalism, this would spell political suicide to
either the SCIRI or the Da'wa Party: most Shi'ites
who voted in the elections, following Sistani's
dictum, thought they were voting for the US to
leave, for good. And in geopolitical terms, all
the Shi'ite religious parties have close
connections with Iran, which, encircled by the US
from the east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq), would
find innumerable creative ways to turn the
Americans' lives into a living hell.
One of the key - if not the key - challenges
for the new Iraqi government will be a US
demand to negotiate a SOFA (Status of Forces
Agreement), the agreement that stipulates the legal
status of US garrisons. A cursory look at a world
map will teach Iraqis to be extremely careful not
to fall into a trap. There are insistent rumors
in Baghdad that a SOFA will not be negotiated
in 2005: the responsibility will fall to
the permanent government that will be elected next
December. This is one more indication of the
irrelevance of the new elected government. The
Pentagon anyway has already determined it will
keep 120,000 troops in Iraq into at least 2007,
even if a withdrawal is demanded tomorrow.
Predictably, the Shi'ites don't
want the US military to leave - at least for
now. Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the Da'wa Party leader
and strong contender for one of the three top
posts, has repeatedly said this would lead to
a bloodbath. But both Abdul Aziz al-Hakim,
the SCIRI's No 1, and interim President
Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, agree: the US military
must begin a substantial withdrawal by the end of
2005.
Shi'ite firebrand Muqtada
al-Sadr is just waiting to pounce. It's
increasingly possible that the Sadrists who contested the
elections may capture something like 7% of the seats in
the new assembly. They've already said they will
demand an immediate timetable for total US
withdrawal. Muqtada wants the Americans out and he wants
them out now. That's also exactly what
disgruntled, religious Sunnis want. This spells a
possible alliance between the Shi'ite urban proletariat
and middle-class religious Sunnis - one more nail
in the coffin of the myth propagated by the
Bush administration that the resistance against
the occupation is dominated by
"terrorists". Significantly, Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, the
leader of the powerful Sunni Association of
Muslim Scholars (AMS), has said he is in close contact
with the Sadrists.
An extraordinary new
development in Baghdad is that now the AMS is
floating a clear proposal: we accept the new
elected government as legitimate, as long as it
sets a definitive timetable for US
withdrawal. Although this is what the overwhelming
majority of Iraqis want, nobody - no Shi'ite
party, no Kurdish party, not even Sistani himself
- is contemplating it at this stage. Baghdad
sources tell Asia Times Online that the AMS would
even issue a fatwa
(religious edict) calling
for the end of the resistance if the new
government sets a date for US withdrawal in writing -
with the United Nations as a watchdog. If true,
that would certainly be the only way to lead the
Baghdad sniper to retire his rifle.
What you want is not what you get
UIA spokesmen are saying that the Shi'ite
alliance will capture half of the seats in the
275-member parliament, or a little less than 140
seats. They would need 182 to govern by
themselves, without a coalition. The Kurds believe
they will get about 65 seats: this only happened
because the Sunni vote ranged from weak to
non-existent. (Election results were due on
Thursday, but were delayed over the re-examination
of some ballot boxes.)
The consensus
in rumor-filled Baghdad is that really bad news
would mean the Shi'ites capturing 140 seats, the
Kurds from 75 to 85 seats, and Allawi's list the
rest. Sunnis in Baghdad are very gloomy: it looks
like the bad-news scenario - a Shi'ite/Kurd landslide -
is about to happen, with Kurds bragging they may
have captured as many as 75 seats.
The
UIA may be Shi'ite-dominated, but it contains more than 20
groups, movements and political parties -
Christians, Turkomans, even Sunnis and Kurds,
including the Badr Organization (the former Badr
Brigades, trained by the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards), the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq and
the Islamic Union for Iraqi Turkomans.
The only Iraqi government that would have a
minimum of stability would be a UIA/Kurdish alliance.
It's very unlikely to happen, and even if
it did it would send even moderate Sunni Arabs into
open guerrilla mode. The Shi'ite religious parties
in the UIA want Sharia law. The White House
is relying on the Kurds to veto Sharia law. The
relatively secular Kurds are obsessed with loose
federalism and a fully fledged, autonomous
Kurdistan province. They want nothing less than
the presidency for Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
leader Jalal Talabani.
The
current foreign minister, the affable Kurd Hoshyar
Zebari, says that the only way to placate the Sunnis
would be to offer them one of the key three
posts - president, prime minister or Speaker
of the National Assembly. It may not be
enough. Sunni Arabs know the Kurds supported the
war and occupation of Iraq and have been a de
facto US protectorate for more than a decade. Sunni Arabs
also know that the only indigenous allies the
Americans have at the moment are the Kurdish tribes:
the Kurdish 36th Command Battalion, for
instance, helped the marines to attack Sunni Arab
Fallujah. Many Sunnis, even moderate, consider the Kurds
traitors.
What the Kurdish tribal chiefs
really want is the ultimate prize: they want
independence (it could even be some kind of
US-Israeli protectorate) and they want Kirkuk's
oil. All of this, for them, is non-negotiable.
Supposing Turkey - a key North Atlantic Treaty
Organization ally dreaming of being accepted by
the European Union - buries the Kurdish dream, and
the Americans cannot deliver, it's fair to assume
that even the Kurds will abandon the Americans.
Meanwhile, in a Najaf still under piles of
rubble there's widespread fear that in the end the
same former CIA asset Allawi will continue to be
prime minister. Allawi has been controlling Iraqi
security for more than six months now. His new
Iraqi National Guard is a remix of Saddam's
security - and not by any coincidence infested
with Saddam's men: after all, Allawi is also a
former Ba'athist.
As the Bush
administration needs a ruthless Iraqi police state
to fight not only the resistance but all kinds of
emerging protests against the appalling living
conditions throughout the country, Allawi is
indeed "the Americans' man", as he is known in
Baghdad. His tough-guy profile will be his main
argument to convince the UIA he should remain as
premier. But Baghdad sources tell Asia Times
Online that this is all cosmetic anyway: only the
terminally naive may believe that the
Washington-Green Zone axis is not controlling the
selection of the top three posts.
No
surrender
The Bush administration script
is well known: Iraq was "liberated" from "tyranny"
and the "insurgents" are fighting democracy - of
which the elections were the first manifestation.
These are the facts: Iraq was conquered, not
liberated; the new government will not have any
say in economic and oil issues; and the resistance
fights the occupying power, not democracy.
Sistani sold the elections to the pious
Shi'ite masses as the first step toward the end of
the occupation. In the next few months his promise
will be subjected to a groundbreaking reality
test. Shi'ites at the polls unmistakably said that
they were voting to expel the Americans, not to
legitimize them.
If the Kurds get too much
power, if the Shi'ite list disintegrates, if the
US keeps building its sprawling military bases -
which means they will be in Iraq for the long run,
supported by puppet governments - the Sunni
resistance will definitely become a national,
Sunni-Shi'ite resistance. As for "terrorism",
according to Baghdad sources, an overwhelming
number of moderate, secular Sunnis and Shi'ites
are convinced that "arch terrorist" Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi is being exploited in a CIA black-ops
designed to exacerbate ethnic tensions.
Many Israeli and American intellectuals
and officials are already busy preparing global
public opinion, calling for an independent
Kurdistan. One of the top-flight propagandists is
ambassador Peter Galbraith, one of the negotiators
of the Dayton accords and currently a professor at
the National War College. Independence is what the
Kurdish leadership wants. Kurds hate the idea of
Iraq: the Iraqi flag is practically forbidden in
some remote mountainous areas. Kurds refuse to
hand the control of their borders to Arab troops
from Baghdad. Former US secretary of state Henry
Kissinger is enthusiastically calling for a
Kurdistan, a Sunni center and a Shi'ite south. Why
not three weak countries instead of one strong,
united Iraq? It's divide and conquer all over
again.
The key reason for the war
was control of Iraqi oil, supported by
the installation of strategic US military bases.
The key question now is which Iraqis will embrace
the agenda of the Bush administration. Secular,
moderate Sunni observers in Baghdad simply cannot
believe the Shi'ite leadership will maintain
public support for the rest of the year without
telling the Americans to leave.
Moreover,
the majority of Iraqis - those who voted and
especially those who didn't - are not willing to
surrender their oil, their economy and their land
to corporate America. The popular resistance, on a
national level, tends only to increase. Shi'ites -
from Sistani to the SCIRI - better not enter into
a Faustian pact.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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