Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star – Lebanon
November 27, 2004

In Iraq they are comparing it to Hulagu Khan’s carnage. In the past year, following the U.S.-led war and the mayhem that followed, about 200,000 Iraqis have perished, according to a survey by the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg school of public health. Fallujah lies in ruins, while death, devastation and anarchy engulf Mosul, Ramadi, Baquba, Buhriz, Beiji and other Iraqi cities and towns.

There is no reliable estimate of the death and destruction visited on Iraq by Hulagu’s forces in 1258, although legend has it that the Mongol invasion was the most catastrophic in Iraqi history. But the havoc wrought by the American occupation forces is more tragic in that these new invaders, unlike their 13th-century predecessors, are doing it with the active collaboration of Iraqis – mainly the Shiite and Kurdish elites.

Iraq has been one of my favorite haunts for decades, and the conduct of its Shiite leadership today reminds me of a concern that an Iraqi intellectual shared with me on my first visit to Baghdad in November 1971. Mohammed Khidir Abbas, then editor in chief of the Baghdad Observer newspaper, said: “The Sunnis have ruled Iraq badly, but the Shiites wouldn’t know how to keep Iraq together to rule it better.”

Sunni-led regimes have been ruling what is now Iraq since the Ottoman conquest of southern Mesopotamia in 1534, and Saddam Hussein’s was among the most repressive of these. Iraq is where civilization was born, and Iraqis are among the brightest and kindest people anywhere. But unlike people in most other regions, and like Arabs elsewhere, they don’t seem to have the motivation and skills to rid themselves of repressive regimes. Instead, Shiites like Ahmed Chalabi and Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi stooped to collaborate with the United States in its invasion of Iraq.

As if that wasn’t disgraceful enough, Shiite expatriates and some local Iraqis have allowed themselves to be used as America’s tools to suppress the Iraqi struggle against the occupation. Allawi’s U.S.-sponsored government ordered the bloody American military crackdown on the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah and elsewhere, while the country’s Shiite and Kurdish leaders looked the other way. As a result, the Shiite-Sunni divide in Iraq has deepened as never before and endangers the country’s future.

The one man in Iraq who could have spared Iraq this agony is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The U.S. has never dared to cross the widely respected cleric, who is the top spiritual leader of the Shiite community internationally. However, the Iranian-born Sistani has been obsessed with the idea of Shiite domination of Iraq. He has turned a blind eye to the Iraqi tragedy, apparently hoping the Americans would help put together a Shiite-dominated government through the elections scheduled for Jan. 30, 2005.

Except for “rebel” cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, few other Shiite leaders have a political base in Iraq, and their public image has been tarnished by their collaboration with the U.S. Most of them are unlikely to be returned to power through a free and competitive election. Hence, at America’s prodding the Shiite leadership has crafted a scheme to unite all Shiite and Kurdish political groups into an anti-Sunni Arab electoral alliance. The allies would put up a joint slate of candidates to avert competitive elections in Shiite and Kurdish regions. Sadr, whose anti-American insurgency unnerved the U.S. and its Iraqi prot?g?s, is giving the idea serious consideration.

Under the scheme, Sadr’s supporters would be allotted 25 percent of the seats, Al-Daawa 15 percent, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq 10 percent, the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan 20 percent, and so on. The Americans believe that a government emanating from this legislative process would be in trustworthy hands. So much for the neoconservative plan to usher democracy into Iraq and the Arab world.

This strategy would spell disaster for Iraq. Sunni Arabs make up less than a fifth of Iraq’s population of 25 million, but the country’s Sunni Arab heartland has been the bastion of its economic, military and political power for a millennium. There will of course be a Shiite majority in any elected Iraqi parliament, but translating head count into political domination overnight is another matter. The Shiites have been far behind the Sunnis economically, educationally and professionally, and any political arrangement that seeks to ignore that reality and marginalize the Sunni Arabs would not only fail, but could also unravel the fragile state.

The stubborn Sunni Arab insurgency is partly a response to the Shiite-Kurdish-American alliance. The widening insurgency, the decision by the (Sunni Arab) Muslim Scholars Association to boycott the January elections, and the (Sunni Arab) Iraqi Islamic Party’s withdrawal from the Allawi government, are loud warnings to Shiite leaders that their power grab could break the country apart along religious lines. They would do well to heed Khidir Abbas’ warning that they need to “keep Iraq together to rule it.”

The biggest challenge to keeping “Iraq together” is, however, Kurdish separatism, which is bound to revive if left unresolved. Iraq’s British colonial rulers annexed Kurdish territory to Iraq after oil was discovered in Kirkuk. Kurdish leaders have since been pushing for real or virtual independence from Iraq. To pursue a resolution of the thorny issue, a rapprochement between Shiites and Sunni Arabs is a necessary first step. The Shiite leadership must stop supporting the American war against the insurgency and engage Sunni Arabs in a dialogue over Iraq’s political future.

The problem is that the Shiite leaders directly collaborating with the Allawi regime and the Americans don’t have the standing to initiate such a dialogue. Would Sistani please step up to the plate?