On Sat, 03 Dec 2005 22:13:41 -0500, Harry Krause wrote:

How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...ocracy_in_iraq
Posted on Dec. 2, 2005

By Juan Cole

The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on
which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq,
however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious
movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he
blew off the lid.

Shiite religious leaders and parties, in particular, have crucially
shaped the new Iraq in each of its three political phases. The first was
during the period of direct American rule, largely by Paul Bremer. The
second comprised the months of interim government, when Iyad Allawi was
prime minister. The third stretches from the formation of an elected
government, with Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, to today.

In the first phase, expatriate Shiite parties returned to the country to
emerge as major players, to the consternation of a confused and clueless
“Coalition Provisional Authority.”

The oldest of these was the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s as a
Shiite answer to mass parties such as the Communist Party of Iraq and
the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Dawa means the call, as in the
imperative to spread the faith. Dawa Party leaders in the 1960s and
1970s dreamed of a Shiite paradise to rival the workers’ paradise of
the Marxists, with a state ruled by Islamic law, where a “consultative
council” somehow selected by the community would make further
regulations in accordance with the Koran. The Dawa Party organized
covert cells throughout the Shiite south. In 1980, in the wake of the
Khomeini revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party cracked
down hard on Dawa, executing many of its leaders, attacking its party
workers and making membership in the party a crime punishable by death.
The upper echelons of the Baath were dominated by Sunni Arabs who
disliked religious Shiites, considering them backward and Iran-oriented
rather than progressive and Arab. In the same year, 1980, Saddam invaded
Iran, beginning a bloody eight-year-long war with his Shiite neighbor.

In the early 1980s, Iran came to be viewed in Washington as public enemy
Number 2, right after the Soviet Union. In the Cold War, the United
States had viewed Iran as a key asset, and in 1953 the CIA overthrew the
populist government of elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which
had broken with the country’s monarch. The U.S. put the autocratic
Mohammad Reza Shah back on his throne, building him up as an absolute
monarch with a well-trained secret police and jails overflowing with
prisoners of conscience. The shah’s obsequiousness toward the U.S.,
and his secularism, provoked the ire of many religious Shiites in Iran.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled as a troublemaker in 1963, had lived
from 1964 to 1978 in Iraq, where he developed a new doctrine that
clerics should rule. In 1978 he was expelled from Iraq to Paris and
helped lead the revolution of 1978-79 that overthrew the shah and
brought Khomeini to power as theocrat in chief.

Khomeini’s rise coincided with that of Saddam, a secular Sunni.
Thousands of activist Shiites from Iraq fled to Iran, and the leadership
congregated in Tehran. In 1982, with the support of the Islamic Republic
of Iran, the Iraqi Shiite exiles formed a militant umbrella group, the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Dawa was also
active there. Among its leaders was a physician from the Shiite holy
city of Karbala named Ibrahim Jaafari. In 1984, the cleric Muhammad
Baqir al-Hakim became the head of SCIRI. From Iran, both Dawa and SCIRI
mounted commando attacks on Baathist facilities and officials,
attempting to overthrow the Baath government. In 1989 Jaafari and other
lay leaders of the Dawa Party relocated to London, seeking greater
freedom of action than they could attain under the watchful eyes of the
ayatollahs in Tehran.

During the Gulf War of 1990-91, when the U.S. and its allies pushed
Saddam Hussein’s forces back out of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush
called on Iraqis to rise up against the dictator. The Shiites took him
at his word, launching a popular revolution in the spring of 1991 in
which they took control of the southern provinces. Bush, fearful of a
Shiite Islamic republic, then allowed the Baath to crush the revolution,
killing tens of thousands. In the aftermath, two clerical leaders
emerged: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, originally from Iran but resident
in Najaf since late 1951, took a cautious and quietist course, teaching
religion but staying out of politics. His rival, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr,
increasingly defied Saddam, organizing poor Shiites into a puritanical
form of religion. In 1999 the Baath secret police killed al-Sadr and his
two older sons. His middle son, Muqtada, went underground. The religious
Shiite parties established their credibility with the Shiite public by
their dissident activities.

In the run-up to the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, both the London
branch of the Dawa Party and the Tehran-based Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq engaged in consultations with Washington.
Both had been involved in extensive meetings with secular Shiite
politician Ahmed Chalabi, who organized the Iraqi National Congress as
an expatriate party aimed at overthrowing the Baath. When Saddam fell,
leaders of both Shiite organizations established themselves in Iraq.
Ibrahim Jaafari came from London with his colleagues and sought to
organize the Dawa Party as a populist political force in the Shiite
south. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq made a triumphal journey overland from Tehran
to Iraq. SCIRI immediately launched membership drives in the villages
and small cities of the Shiite south and garnered thousands, perhaps
millions, of new members over the next year and a half.

In April and May of 2003, after the fall of Saddam, the Sadr movement
emerged into the spotlight. Muqtada al-Sadr, just 30 years old, did not
have the scholarly credentials to be a great clerical leader, but the
fanatic devotion of the slum-dwelling Shiite masses to his father
ensured that he, too, would be met with acclaim when he came out of
hiding. He organized the takeover by his followers of most major mosques
in the ghetto of East Baghdad, which was promptly renamed Sadr City in
honor of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. He immediately launched regular
demonstrations against what he characterized as the U.S. occupation of
Iraq, demanding that American troops depart immediately. In the summer
of 2003, he began organizing his militia, the Mahdi Army. He desires a
theocratic government similar to that in Iran.

The U.S. State Department, fearful that the Pentagon might install
corrupt expatriate politician Chalabi in power in Iraq, convinced
President George W. Bush instead to send in Paul Bremer, who had been a
career foreign service officer. Bremer intended initially to rule Iraq
single-handedly. As the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement gained momentum in
May and June, it became clear to him that he could not hope to rule Iraq
by himself, and he appointed a governing council of 25 members. Ibrahim
Jaafari of Dawa and Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of SCIRI were appointed, as
were several prominent figures with backgrounds in the Iraqi Dawa Party,
along with Sunni Arabs and members of minorities.

Bremer’s plan to have the constitution written by a committee
appointed by himself foundered when it met strong objections from Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In a fatwa, or legal ruling, Sistani insisted
that an Iraqi constitution must be drafted by delegates to a constituent
assembly elected by the Iraqi people. Bremer initially discounted this
criticism. He is alleged to have asked one of his aides, “Can’t we
get a fatwa from some other mullah?” It gradually became apparent that
Sistani’s authority was such that he could overrule the U.S. proconsul
on this issue.

By October of 2003, as the guerrilla war grew, it became clear that
Bremer could not in fact hope to rule Iraq by fiat, and that the U.S.
would have to hand sovereignty back to the Iraqis. Bremer’s initial
plan was to hold circumscribed elections for a parliament. Most voters
would be members of the provincial councils (each with 16 to 40 members)
that the U.S. and Britain had somehow massaged into existence.

Again, Sistani objected, insisting that only open, one-person, one-vote
elections could guarantee a government that reflected the will of the
Iraqi people. It was almost as though Sistani were quoting French
political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Americans. He also
insisted on a prominent role for the United Nations as midwife to the
new Iraq. When it seemed as though the Bush administration might ignore
him, Sistani brought 40,000 demonstrators into the streets in Basra and
100,000 in Baghdad in mid-January of 2004. The Bush administration
immediately acquiesced. U.S. special envoy Ibrahim Lakhdar came for
extensive consultations, and elections were set for January 2005. In the
meantime, the U.S. would hand sovereignty to an appointed government for
six months, with a supporting United Nations resolution.

The weakness of the U.S. in Iraq encouraged the proliferation of party
paramilitaries. The Dawa Party began having men patrol in some cities.
SCIRI expanded its Badr Corps militia, originally trained by the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards. These militias avoided conflict with the U.S.
because their parties had a marriage of convenience with the Bush
administration, and because they agreed not to carry heavy weaponry. It
is alleged that the Supreme Council continues to receive substantial
help from Iran, and that the clerics in Tehran still pay the salaries of
some of the Badr Corps fighters. The likelihood is that the Iranians
give at least a little money and support to a wide range of Shiite
politicians in Iraq, including some secularists, so that whoever comes
out on top is beholden to them. The mullahs in Iraq probably support the
Supreme Council more warmly than any other political party, however.

In contrast, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr was viewed by the
Americans as a threat, even though the Sadrists seldom came into violent
conflict with U.S. troops. As the handover of sovereignty approached,
the Americans in Iraq suddenly announced that they wanted to kill or
capture Muqtada al-Sadr, and they arrested several of his key aides in
early April 2004. He responded by launching a massive revolt, which
initially succeeded in taking control of East Baghdad and several
southern cities. Through hard fighting, the U.S. military gradually
defeated the Mahdi Army, reaching a truce in early June. In August,
fighting broke out again between the Sadrists and the Marines in the
holy city of Najaf. This crisis was resolved when Sistani returned from
London after a heart procedure there to call for all Iraqis to march on
Najaf. The flooding of the city by civilians made further fighting
impossible, and Muqtada al-Sadr slipped away. Thereafter Muqtada fell
quiet for many months. When he reemerged, it was as a political broker
rather than simply a warlord.

The Americans had had to give up their hopes of ruling Iraq directly,
both because of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war and the challenge of the
Shiites. Although he was more peaceful about it, Sistani opposed key
American initiatives as much as the young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr did.
The Mahdi Army uprising was the nail in the coffin of direct American
rule of Iraq. Next, the U.S. completely lost control of the political
process.

In fall 2004, Sistani intervened to shape the upcoming elections. He
insisted that all the major Shiite parties run on a single list, to
avoid splitting the Shiite vote. Since Shiites comprise about 62% of
Iraqis, a united Shiite list could hope to win a majority in parliament.
The coalition of Dawa, SCIRI and smaller Shiite parties won the election
on Jan. 30, as Sistani had foreseen. The U.S. had attempted to build up
the old CIA asset and secular ex-Baathist, Iyad Allawi, as the natural
leader of Iraq. It signally failed. His list received only about 14% of
seats in parliament.

The real winners of the January 2005 elections were the Shiite religious
parties. This was bad news for Bush. In partnership with the Kurdish
Alliance, they formed a government that brought Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa
to power as prime minister and gave Dawa and SCIRI several important
posts in the executive. Sunni Arabs from the rival branch of Islam were
largely excluded from the new government, insofar as they had either
boycotted the election or had been unable to vote for security reasons.
The new Jaafari government quickly established warm relations with Iran,
receiving a pledge of $1 billion in aid, the use of Iranian port
facilities and help with refining Iraqi petroleum.

At the provincial level, the Shiite parties swept to power throughout
the south. SCIRI dominated nine of 11 provinces that had a significant
Shiite population, including Baghdad province. The Sadrists took Maysan
province and Basra province. Shiite militias proliferated and
established themselves.

The dominance of the central legislature and the executive by religious
Shiites gave Sistani great moral authority over the drafting of the
permanent constitution, the main task of the new parliament. The Shiites
inserted a provision that no legislation could be passed by parliament
that contravened the established laws of Islam, and made provisions for
Muslim clerics to be appointed to the judiciary. Some important elements
of the old Dawa Party vision of a government in accordance with Islam
was therefore achieved, though it was leavened by modern, secular human
rights ideals. When Dawa and SCIRI were based in Tehran in the 1980s,
plotting to overthrow Saddam and come to power, they could not have
imagined that their dream would be realized 20 years later with American
help. Jaafari, the elected prime minister, employed his position to
strengthen the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party that he headed. Abdul
Aziz al-Hakim had lived to see his Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq rule half the provinces of Iraq, including the
capital, as well as play a central role in the parliament and the
cabinet. Both parties drew Baghdad closer to Tehran, seeking warm
relations with the clerical rulers of Iran. Shiite power now dominated
the eastern stretches of the Middle East. The Bush administration
trumpeted its bestowal of democracy in the region, but most Middle
Eastern observers saw only the installation of a new Shiite power.

The hawks in the Bush administration had initially hoped that a
conquered Iraq would form the launching pad for a further American war
on Iran. The Shiites of Iraq foiled that plan. Sistani forced the
Americans into direct, one-person, one-vote elections. Those elections
in turn ensured that the religious Shiites would come to power, since
they had the greatest street credibility, given their long struggle
against Saddam and their nationalist credentials in the face of American
occupation.

An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites who had often lived in exile in
Iran for decades is inevitably an Iraq with warm relations with Tehran.
The U.S., bogged down in a military quagmire in the Sunni Arab regions,
cannot afford to provoke massive demonstrations and uprisings in the
Shiite areas of Iraq by attacking Iran. Bush has inadvertently
strengthened Iran, giving it a new, religious Shiite ally in the Gulf
region. The traditional Sunni powers in the region, such as the kings of
Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are alarmed and annoyed that Bush has created a
new “Shiite crescent.” Far from weakening or overthrowing the
ayatollahs, Bush has ensconced and strengthened them. Indeed, by chasing
after imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he may have lost
any real opportunity to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon
should it decide to do so.

The real winners of the Iraq war are the Shiites.


Thanks Harry.

A well written artical that needs to be reduced to "talking points"
so more of the "flock" that have been trained to accept the
"talking points" form of reporting will understand.

Maybe open some eyes. _________m___O¿O___m___________
Perhaps get some out of this "lock step, follow the leader", way of
thinking.

An elected Commander in Chief doesn't just become a great military leader.

It takes Generals years of military experience to be considered a military
leader, and that is the occupation that they chose. Thankfully they are
not just a bunch of appointed cronies.

Y'all have a good day.
--
_________m___~¿õ___m___________
Just another registered Linux user.
http://counter.li.org/

On Sun, 04 Dec 2005 07:43:27 -0500, Harry Krause wrote:

(Polite snip so others can re-read the second post)


Hard as it is to believe, it appears Bush is as naive now as to how the
world works as he was prior to assuming national office.

This is interesting:

Top cleric backs Iraqi candidates with religious intent

By Liz Sly
Chicago Tribune

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The revered Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani weighed into Iraq's election campaign Saturday with an
instruction to his followers on how to vote that amounted to an
endorsement of the ruling pro-Iranian Shiite coalition.

In what his aides described as an oral statement issued through his
Office of Fatwa, or religious instruction, in the holy city of Najaf,
al-Sistani said Shiites are obligated to vote in the Dec. 15 election.
He also specified that they should favor lists of candidates who are
religiously inclined and that they should not vote for "weak" ones.

The only group that fits that description is the United Iraqi Alliance,
the heavyweight Shiite coalition of major religious parties that won the
most votes in the last election and now dominates the government.
- - -

Religiously inclined, indeed. Iraq is going to have an interesting future.

And Iran Focus is reporting this:

Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Dec. 01 – A radical Islamist weekly close to Iran’s
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumpeted the recent visit by Iraqi
President Jalal Talabani to Iran and his meeting with the Supreme Leader
of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as having invoked the
fury of senior United States officials.

“The American ambassador to Iraq officially protested to the Iraqi
government and displayed his fury, after the meeting between Jalal
Talabani and the Supreme Leader, who lashed out at the U.S.”, the
ultra-conservative weekly Parto-Sokhan wrote in its latest issue.

The paper quoted an Iraqi security official as saying that through its
embassy in Baghdad Washington had “strongly protested” high-level
meetings between Iraqi and Iranian officials.

“The U.S. strongly protested the anti-American comments of Ayatollah
Khamenei in the meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. They were
critical of the Iraqi President”, the paper wrote, adding that
Washington was also concerned security agreements between the two states.


ALL of this mess is the fault of the Bush misAdministration. Every bit
of it.



Doesn't sound as if the Iraqi leadership are following "lock step" with
the U.S.
Making new friends without us....hummmm?
Maybe they are ready for us to leave.
We should take the hint.
I hope this isn't a missed opportunity for the Bush administration.



Y'all have a super Sunday!
--

______m___~¿õ___m_________________
Just another registered Linux user.
http://counter.li.org/