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2 The nightmare Bush dreads most
By Dilip Hiro
violence, and whose commitment to
bringing about the end of the foreign occupation
of Iraq is as strong as Muqtada's - albeit not as
vocal.
In a message to the nation on the
eve of the fourth anniversary of the demise of
Saddam's Ba'athist regime, Muqtada coupled his
order to the Mehdi fighters to intensify their
campaign to expel the Anglo-American troops with a
call to the Iraqi security forces to join the
struggle to defeat "the arch enemy - America". He
urged
them
to cease targeting Iraqis and direct their anger
at the occupiers.
It was the Mehdi Army -
controlling the shrine of Imam Ali, the founder of
Shi'ite Islam, in the holy city of Najaf - that
battled the American troops to a standstill in
August 2004. The impasse lasted a fortnight,
during which large parts of Najaf's old city were
reduced to rubble, with the government of the
US-appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi, favorite
Iraqi exile of the Central Intelligence Agency and
the State Department as well as leader of the
exiled Iraqi National Accord, failing to defuse
it.
By contrast, it took Sistani, freshly
back in Najaf, his home base, from London after
eye surgery a single session with Muqtada over
dinner to resolve the crisis. A compromise
emerged. The Mehdi Army ceded control of the holy
shrine not to the Americans or their Iraqi cohorts
but to Sistani's representatives, and both Mehdi
militiamen and US troops left the city.
The towering Sistani Ali
Sistani established his nationalist credentials
early on. As the invading American forces neared
Najaf on March 25, 2003, he issued a religious
decree requiring all Muslims to resist the
invading "infidel" troops. Once the Anglo-American
forces occupied Iraq, he adamantly refused to meet
American or British officials or their emissaries,
and continues to do so to this day.
In
January, 2004, when Washington favored appointing
a hand-picked body of Iraqis, guided by American
experts, to draft the Iraqi constitution along
secular, democratic and capitalist lines, Sistani
decided to act. He called on the faithful to
demonstrate for an elected Parliament, which would
then be charged with drafting the constitution -
and he succeeded.
Sistani then issued a
religious decree calling on the faithful to
participate in the vote to create a representative
assembly committed to achieving the exit of
foreign troops through peaceful means. The White
House, however, exploited Sistani's move as part
of its own "democracy promotion" campaign in Iraq,
with Iraqi fingers dipped in inedible purple ink
becoming its much flaunted "democracy symbol".
When Allawi began dithering about holding
the vote for an interim parliament by January
2005, as stipulated by UN Security Council
Resolution 1546, Sistani warned that he would call
for popular non-cooperation with the occupying
powers if it was not held on time.
In the
elections that followed, the United Iraqi Alliance
- the brain-child of Sistani - emerged as the
majority group and thus the leading designer of
the new constitution. Respecting Sistani's views,
the Iraqi constitution stipulated that sharia
(Islamic law) was to be the principal source of
Iraqi legislation and that no law would be passed
that violated the undisputed tenets of Islam.
In the December 2005 parliamentary general
election under the new constitution, the UIA
became the largest group, a mere 10 seats short of
a majority. Though Ibrahim Jaafari of Da'awa won
the contest for UIA leadership by one vote, he was
rejected as prime minister by the Kurdish parties,
holding the parliament's swing votes, as well as
by Washington and London. A crisis paralyzed the
government. Once again, Sistani's intercession
defused a crisis. He persuaded Jaafari to step
down.
Jaafari's successor, Maliki, is as
reverential toward Sistani as other Shi'ite
leaders. For instance, in December 2006, when
American officials reportedly urged Maliki to
postpone Saddam's execution until after the
religious holiday of Eid Al Adha (the Festival of
Sacrifice), Maliki turned to Sistani. The grand
ayatollah favored an immediate execution. And so
it came to pass.
Sistani's next blow fell
on the Bush administration earlier this month. He
let be known his disapproval of Washington-backed
legislation to allow thousands of former Ba'ath
Party members to resume their public service
positions. That undermined one of the White
House's pet projects in Iraq - an attempt to
entice into the political mainstream part of the
alienated Sunni minority that is at the heart of
the Iraqi insurgency.
In sum, while
refraining from participating in everyday
politics, Sistani intervenes on the issues of
paramount importance to the Iraqi people, as he
sees them. Western journalists, who routinely
describe him as belonging to the "quietist school"
of Shi'ite Islam (at odds with the
"interventionist school"), are therefore off the
mark.
Given Sistani's uncompromising
opposition to the presence of foreign troops in
Iraq, his staunch nationalism and the unmatched
reverence that he evokes, particularly among the
majority Shi'ites, he poses a greater long-term
threat to Washington's interests in Iraq than
Muqtada; and, far from belonging to opposite
schools of Shi'ite Islam, Muqtada and Sistani,
both staunch nationalists, complement each other -
much to the puzzled frustration of the White
House.
What must worry Washington more
than the massive size of the demonstration on
April 9 was its mixed Shi'ite-Sunni composition
and nationalistic ambience. The prospect of
Muqtada's appeal extending to a section of the
Sunni community, with the tacit support of
Sistani, is the nightmare scenario that the Bush
administration most dreads. Yet it may come to
pass.
Dilip Hiro is the author
of Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom
and After and, most recently, Blood of the
Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil
Resources (Nation Books).
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