Iranian Alert -- January 16, 2004 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD --Americans for Regime Change in Iran

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

Iran Reformists to Fast In Attempt to Reverse Ballot Bans

January 16, 2004
The Associated Press
Dow Jones Newswires

TEHRAN -- Reformist lawmakers on the sixth day of a parliament sit-in vowed Friday to begin a fast in an attempt to force the reversal of the disqualification of more than 3,000 candidates from next month's election.

Mohammad Reza Khatami, a vice speaker of parliament who has been barred from the election, told a press conference inside parliament that reformist lawmakers would begin fasting Saturday.

"We are determined even more than before to resist illegal hard-line efforts to hold a sham election through mass disqualification of hopefuls," said Khatami, leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Iran's largest reformist party, and a younger brother of President Mohammad Khatami.

"We are prepared to pay all costs of defending free elections," he said. "Without free elections, democracy is meaningless."

The Guardian Council, an unelected constitutional watchdog controlled by hard-liners, has disqualified thousands of the nearly 8,200 prospective candidates - including 80 sitting reformist lawmakers - for Feb. 20 legislative elections.

The move early this month caused outrage among reformists, and lawmakers have protested with sit-ins since Sunday.

The disqualifications were seen as an attempt to bolster hard-liners in the long-simmering power struggle with allies of President Khatami, who seek social and political reform.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei intervened Wednesday to cool down the developing political crisis and ordered the 12-member Guardian Council, appointed by him, to reconsider its disqualifications.

Reformers have welcomed Khamenei's intervention but say they are waiting to see how the council will interpret the order. Khamenei also told the council to "resist bullying tactics" by some lawmakers.

"We have seen no positive step by the council so far and there is no guarantee that there will be free elections. We will begin fasting as of Saturday to step up our campaign," Khatami said.

The protesting lawmakers said their sit-in will continue until all disqualified candidates are allowed to run in the upcoming polls.

"We are defending the basic right of all Iranians to choose and be chosen," said Meysam Saeidi, another reformist lawmaker disqualified from the election.

"This is the final battle for democracy in Iran where hard-liners seek to impose brazen dictatorship through sham elections. There is no way to give in," he said.

Khamenei, who holds ultimate say in Iran, is seen as the leader of hard-liners, but has reined them in on occasion in the past to prevent an overt clash with liberals.

He met council members Wednesday and told them that incumbent legislators, who already have been approved by the council for past elections, should be deemed qualified to run "unless it's proven otherwise."

For new candidates, he said, "logical and common qualification is sufficient, and there is no need for further investigation."

Iran's 27 provincial governors have vowed to resign by Monday unless disqualifications are reversed. Khatami's administration has indicated it may not even hold the elections if disqualifications aren't reversed.

Hard-liners, who control unelected bodies including the judiciary, have thwarted the president's reform plans for years.

The Feb. 20 elections are seen as a test for Iran's reformers, whose popularity has waned because of their perceived failure to deliver on promises of liberalization.

Reformists believe the ruling Islamic establishment needs to become more open and respect the demands of its overwhelmingly youthful population and accuse hard-liners of seeking to impose dictatorship in the name of Islam.

But hard-liners hope to prevent a parliament dominated by reformers, who have sought profound changes and support Western-style democracy, which the conservatives say is against the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

http://framehosting.dowjonesnews.com/sample/samplestory.asp?StoryID=2004011617170005&Take=1

The Splits

David Warren/1-14-03

The Syrian president, Bashir Assad, may soon have a bigger problem with Hezbollah than Israel has. This is because, after a generation of hosting the most psychopathic arm of Iran's psychopathic theocracy, Mr. Assad no longer wants to know them. His minority Alawite, Baathist dictatorship, which Hezbollah has helped to sustain over the years, suddenly finds itself in a position where it must make new friends. Specifically, it is in urgent need of better relations with Turkey, the United States, and Israel; and Hezbollah is not popular with any of them.

It isn't in the forefront of the news, but the Syrian dictatorship is under huge and growing pressure from an increasingly impatient Bush administration to stop the terrorist insurgency into Iraq through Syria. The U.S. also wants Syria to open to Western inspection, as Libya has just done, the Assad regime's illicit weapons programmes, and for them to surrender Saddamite agents and weapons that they are almost certainly hiding.

This at a time when Syria has never been so isolated within the Arab world. It is now surrounded by American allies on all sides, except for a small patch of oceanfront, and the former state of Lebanon, which it continues to occupy in defiance of all international law. And Damascus is the headquarters for about a dozen Jihadist organizations whose senior members are on almost everyone's most-wanted list.

Imad Fayez Mughniyeh is among them -- Hezbollah's ingenious operations chief, mastermind of innumerable very bloody incidents, including the bombings of the U.S. embassy and marine barracks in Beirut back in 1983. The Americans want him very, very badly.

President Assad continued to offer lip service to the "Islamic revolution" months after that ceased to be fashionable, with the fall of Baghdad. He briefly imagined himself filling the fallen Saddam Hussein's shoes as the rhetorical champion of the "oppressed Arabs". He did this, I believe, more out of stupidity than from any other motive. With the passage of months, it became obvious to him and to his advisers that they were isolated, abroad. Worse, they became increasingly isolated at home, where the televised sight of Iraqis celebrating the overthrow of Baathism in the streets of Baghdad was putting ideas into the streets of Damascus.

The back-pedalling now is frenetic. Last week, Mr. Assad went on an appeasement tour of Turkey, the northern neighbour that almost invaded Syria in 1998 -- before his father and predecessor evicted the Kurdish guerrilla leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and shopped his Damascus-based terror operations to the Turks.

The Turks strongly advised, as the Americans had been doing, that it was time for Syria to make peace with Israel; and this week Mr. Assad is wrestling with his own past vows, in order to make that possible. There were semi-secret Israeli-Syrian negotiations for the return of the Golan Heights in exchange for a Sadat-style recognition of Israel's legitimacy, that ended in the year 2000. These should shortly resume.

But, not yet able to acknowledge domestically the evaporation of his negotiating position, Mr. Assad cannot stop blustering. Yesterday, he turned down publicly and rather contemptuously an invitation from Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, to visit Israel directly. He insists that the negotiations with Israel resume from where they left off, rather than starting again from scratch. This latter position is pure buffoonery, since the two sides would have to negotiate even to agree where the last negotiations left off.

His justified fear of the U.S. has him making distance from Hezbollah's chief sponsor, the ayatollahs' Iran, and possibly shopping minor terror assets quietly. Iran's ayatollahs in turn are making their own cautious concessions to the U.S., in light of Iraq. Such splits are happening throughout the region, as various regimes manoeuvre to assure their own survival in the face of a post-Saddam earthquake. Even Saudi Arabia is making discreet overtures to Israel, about an eventual peace treaty that could leave the Palestinians as diplomatically isolated as the Assad regime now finds itself.

But no such negotiations are easy, given the past. There is too much rhetoric to climb down from quickly.

One of the diplomatic difficulties for statesmen from democratic countries, is the Arab leaders' unfamiliarity with the exigencies of electoral politics. I am not being sarcastic about this -- I've been told by people who have had firsthand experience, that even so urbane a leader as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak genuinely fails to understand what it might be like to have an electorate.

In the case of Bashir Assad, who, like his father before him, compounds imaginative with other intellectual disabilities, the problem is especially acute. He persists in making ludicrous demands, for the sake of his public image. He does not understand, for instance, that no prime minister of Israel can give away the Golan Heights, as a precondition for having a conversation with him. This is because a substantial majority of Israelis, many of whom still remember that the Golan Heights were used prior to their conquest in 1967 as a platform from which to rain shells down upon lower-lying Israeli villages, would rather keep the high ground. They might give it back, but not for nothing.

On the other hand, Mr. Assad has a political problem, that we fail to appreciate fully: that if he does make peace with Israel, Hezbollah will skin him alive.

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Jan04/index188.shtml

Trouble

David Warren/1-17-04

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, Iraq's highest-ranking Shia cleric, has begun seriously throwing his weight around in Iraq, helping to organize a demonstration in Basra yesterday of tens of thousands of Shia faithful, to chant "No to America!" and demand immediate mass elections -- in a country which has not had a reliable census in several decades, and where the infrastructure for a fair general election does not yet exist. Raising the temperature further, the second-ranking Shia cleric, Hojat Al-Islam Ali Abdulhakim Alsafi, has written a sarcastic public letter to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, that is being read in all the mosques.

The Shia of Iraq are not an homogenous and discrete ethnic group. Most are racially and linguistically Arab, which alone distinguishes them from the Shia of Iran. While their numbers are overwhelming in the southern third of Iraq, they may be found everywhere; and among Arab Iraqis, there is some degree of shading between Shia and Sunni sects. Unknown, but very large proportions are not religious; and the tribal orders of the countryside break down in Basra and other large cities. And not all the devoted pay their respects to Ayatollah Sistani.

Nevertheless, Sistani has more prestige than anyone in Iraq, and when he commands the faithful to take to the streets, his orders are echoed in the Friday prayers, and reinforced by stick-wielding zealots.

More fundamentally, power corrupts. I fear that Iraq's Shia clerics and their camp followers have only begun to get a taste of power, and their appetite for it will grow quickly as they acquire more. This in a country with no experience of give-and-take, no machinery of checks and balances -- things which take decades or centuries to grow, and require stability.

This is evident in Ayatollah Sistani's own proclamations. He began by counselling Iraqis to co-operate with U.S. and British troops, and by declaring that he had no political aspirations. While he still plays the role of a purely religious leader, he has surrounded himself with political operatives. His demands have become more strident, and are now coupled with threats. He adds new demands to further increase the pressure: most recently saying that the snap election must be combined with a referendum on whether U.S. troops should be allowed to stay.

The U.S. position is constrained, thrice over. 1. Since the Iraqi people were not defeated, but liberated from a tyrant by the U.S. invasion, the U.S. does not have the luxury of dictating to the conquered. 2. Since it refused to install the secular-Shia Ahmed Chalabi as an "Iraqi Karzai" for moderate forces to rally around, it has left the Shia clerics to fish the whole pool. 3. The Bush administration further gave away its key wild-card trading position. It has publicly declared it will not consider breaking the country into three or more constituent national parts (say, Kurdistan, a Sunni-majority "Upper Mesopotamia", and a Shia-majority "Lower Mesopotamia"). The threat of this last would be the natural trump against a Shia power-play.

It could become a threat regardless, for the Shia clerical muscle-flexing is already making the Kurdish leadership feel claustrophobic. They have had the pleasure of governing themselves, and have done a good job of creating a fairly open and prosperous society in the part of Iraq that was put under the protection of the allied no-fly zone after the Gulf War. They are powerfully allergic to mullahs whose sense of reality is evaporating.

And the Sunni Triangle, which the American soldiers are finally getting under control (violent incidents and casualties dropping week by week), could suddenly re-erupt as people who did well out of Saddam Hussein's tribal Sunni dictatorship, contemplate the prospect of the U.S. delivering the country into the hands of their most lethal enemies. They know the Americans won't massacre them; but they also know that the Shia have scores to settle with them. Their solution has always been, strike first.

Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, is currently in the States with a delegation of the Iraqi governing council under its present rotating chairman Adnan Pachachi. While Mr. Bremer again consults anxiously with the White House on what to do, Mr. Pachachi is leading an American-backed Iraqi appeal to the United Nations in New York, to please get involved in the Iraqi transition. Once again, U.N. cover is wanted to take some of the heat off the U.S. But as we've seen in the past, the last thing the U.N. wants to do is to be helpful.

The Bush administration has pulled off so many miracles in Iraq so far, that they should not be counted out for another. But they are now playing with a bad hand, against people who anyway cheat at poker. They have no motive to raise the stakes; the trick now is to cut their losses.

MISCALCULATIONS

Get Iraqis on their own.

by Amir Taheri
National Review Online
January 16, 2004

Is the Bush administration having second thoughts about its plan to transfer power to an interim Iraqi government by the end of June?

The question is raised by recent remarks made by officials in Washington and Baghdad about possible delays in implementing the plan. The cited source of their doubts is a statement made last Sunday by Grand Ayatollah Ali Muhammad Sistani, the most prominent religious leader of Iraqi Shiites.

Sistani's comment was a response to a group of unnamed "believers" who wished to know what he thought of the plan to set up an interim government. The ayatollah replied: "The ideal mechanism is an election, which many experts believe is possible to hold within the next months with an acceptable level of transparency and credibility."

The Coalition plan, however, envisages a process of selecting the interim government through a number of caucuses and informal consultations with ethnic, tribal, religious, and political groups. The Coalition authorities, and almost all Iraqi political parties, believe that the country is not yet ready for free and fair elections, and that an interim government representing all strands of opinion is the best option.

Thus, Sistani's call for elections is seen by some officials in Washington and Baghdad as a definitive rejection of the current plan. But this is a dangerous misreading not only of Sistani's intentions, but also of the role that the Shiite clergy should play in a future democratic Iraq.

To begin with, Sistani's statement is a fatwa, which means an opinion, and not a decree or an edict, as some U.S. officials, including L. Paul Bremer, the Coalition's chief civilian administrator, seem to believe.

In Shiism, as in Islam in general, no religious expert (mujtahid) has the authority to issue either a decree or an edict. There are no popes and cardinals in Islam, and the opinion of one religious expert could be challenged or even contradicted by another's. Believers refer to experts when they feel they cannot find the proper answer to a question on their own. If they find the answer given by one expert inadequate or unreasonable, they can always refer to another expert or revert to their own judgment. In other words, the religious expert in Islam is like a medical doctor whose diagnosis may be challenged or rejected by a second opinion.

All of this is based on a key principle of Islam: the notion that an individual bears sole responsibility for his actions. There is no confession or excommunication. The believer has a duty to consult as widely as he can before he acts on any matter, yet in the end, the decision is his, and his alone.

This principle, however, has been challenged however, notably the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini. They claim that most Muslims, being poor and illiterate, lack the knowledge and moral strength needed to make correct decisions. They call the masses the mustazafeen, meaning "the enfeebled ones".

"The mustazafeen need the guardianship of the theologians, as much as sheep need a shepherd," Khomeini wrote almost 50 years ago. It was on that principle that Khomeini based his Islamic republic in Iran in 1979 and wrote a constitution under which a mullah, designated as "The Supreme Guide," has absolute power beyond the wildest dreams of even the most despotic monarch.

Sistani understands all this perfectly. For almost 50 years he has been in the camp of those who have defended mainstream Islam against Khomeinist and other deviations from the faith. Thus Sistani would be the last person to claim that he has any authority to dictate what the people of Iraq should or should not do. It would be a supreme irony if this veteran anti-Khomeinist cleric is transformed into an Iraqi version of the ayatollah by Bremer and company.

To be sure, the Coalition authorities must respect Sistani, not only because it is good politics but also, and perhaps especially, because he deserves the highest degree of respect. Sistani should also be consulted, albeit not directly by occupation officials, on all issues just as other prominent Iraqi citizens are. But it would be wrong to treat Sistani as a political leader of Iraqi Shiites. When it comes to taking and applying political decisions, the Coalition must deal with Iraqi politicians. Dragging Sistani into politics is bad for Iraq, bad for him, and bad for the Coalition.

How, then, should one take Sistani's latest opinion? The cleric says that holding elections is the "ideal," and not the only, mechanism for forming an interim government. This means that if his ideal mechanism were proved unrealistic by present circumstances he would be prepared to change his opinion. This could be done with the help of the Governing Council, whose current chairman, Adnan Pachachi, is in contact with Sistani and the United Nations, whose experts agree that Iraq is not ready for elections.

But even if, at the end of the day, Sistani remains unconvinced, that should not bring the whole process to a halt. It is unlikely that Iraqi Shiites would be foolish enough to repeat their mistake of 1920 and choose to stay out of the nation's political life. Holding elections is not a religious duty, but a matter of political expediency. The Koran calls for consultation (shawr), and not elections in the Western democratic sense, as a key for legitimizing any government.

I do, however, happen to agree with Sistani that the ideal way to form an interim Iraqi government is through free and fair elections. I also share Sistani's belief that such elections, though extremely difficult to organize, are not impossible to hold.

Having said that, the responsibility for Iraq lies with the Coalition and the Governing Council, not with any theologian or media commentator. Theologians and media commentators, and others who might contribute to the debate, must be heard. But the ultimate decision, legally and morally, rests with the Coalition. If a premature attempt at holding elections leads to disaster, it won't be Sistani or any media commentator who will pay the political, and other, costs of failure.

What's most needed now is for Iraq's governance to be handed over to the Iraqis, as quickly as possible. I doubt that Sistani would want to be held responsible for postponing the transfer of power to the Iraqis and for prolonging the occupation. The Coalition rejects the election option not because it is technically difficult, but because the results cannot be pre-scripted.

Sistani is right, and the Coalition is wrong. But this is not the end of the world: Iraq has been liberated and will have plenty of free elections in future. Emerging from half a century of despotism, terror, and war, the people of Iraq cannot afford a prolonged period of uncertainty. They need a clear political roadmap that, though it may not be ideal, would nonetheless suffice in guiding them through a difficult period of transition.

— Amir Taheri is an NRO contributor and the Iranian author of ten books on the Middle East and Islam. He is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.

http://nationalreview.com/comment/taheri200401161239.asp

OUR MOMENT OF VAINGLORY

A P.C. mess.

by Michael A. Ledeen
National Review Online
January 16, 2004

We are now making the Afghans and the Iraqis pay a terrible price for American political correctness, and the price is being exacted by our diplomats and misnamed "strategists." The fundamental error — enshrined, as the splendid Diane Ravitch has recently explained in her stellar work on American history textbooks — is the belief that American political and civic culture is just one among many, no better and quite likely considerably worse, than most. Hence we have no right to tell anyone, here or elsewhere, how they should behave.

This leads inevitably to one of Jerry Bremer's favorite dicta, which is that the United States policy in Iraq must be "even-handed." We will not support one party, or group, or faction, against the others. We're not going to take sides. We will manage things in such a way that all Iraqis will have a fair shot at political participation, and then we will let the Iraqis decide what they want.

That doctrine is lethal to freedom in the Middle East, where none of the many active tyrants in the region has the slightest interest in even-handedness. The tyrants want to survive, and if at all possible, to win. They do not want free societies or polities in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they fear the spread of freedom to their own countries, which would spell their doom. So they are feverishly supporting their own tyrannical kind under the benevolent noses of American overseers. The Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, and others are pouring money, mullahs, imams, killers, and political enforcers into the recently liberated countries. They are spending millions of dollars to blanket Iraq with anti-American, fanatical broadcasts from an amazing number of radio and television stations (Iran alone is running more than ten of them), and they are supporting those Iraqis who will push for Islamic tyrannies in both countries.

Our misguided notion of even-handedness is in effect a surrender to the forces of tyranny. We do nothing to support the pro-democratic, basically secular groups and parties, we in fact have long withheld funding (despite laws and appropriations to the contrary) from the Iraqi National Congress — a pro-American, democratic, inclusive, and even multicultural umbrella group — and we have recently acquiesced in legislation in both Iraq and Afghanistan that gives Islamic law — sharia — privileged standing, specifically in civil marriage and inheritance procedures.

No wonder the Baghdad dentist who operates www.healingiraq.com writes caustically "I'm so happy about this, now I can marry and divorce in any way I like. Yay! I'm at the moment gathering family members to go to the local cleric so I can divorce my fourth wife which I don't really like anymore, and get myself an 11 year-old virgin. All the other small details will be settled within the family and with the blessings of the Sayid."

President Bush should tremble at the thought that all our efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East will, instead, replace one form of tyranny with another. He should have been outraged when our ambassador plenipotentiary in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, twice accepted the definition of Afghanistan as an Islamic republic. He should intervene to stop (Islamic) legal proceedings against two Afghan women now charged with "blasphemy" for questioning the desirability of giving sharia special status in the new national constitution. And he should insist that Americans not fight, and even die, for the creation of yet more theocratic states in the Middle East.

All this is the inevitable result of the doctrines of political correctness, which make it socially unacceptable to state the simple truth that the United States has developed a superior political culture, one of the crucial elements of which is the separation of church and state. When Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this act of genius in the early 1830s, he marveled that it made both politics and religion stronger and more responsive to the needs of their followers, and he urged Europeans to adopt it. Scholar after scholar, including some of the best of the Islamic world, have recognized that an excessive intrusion of certain Islamic precepts into civil society has contributed mightily to the lack of freedom, creativity and even scientific knowledge. The liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan gave hope that the region's long decline might be reversed. Yet our own leaders, on the ground and back in Washington, are permitting one of the main elements in the ruin of the region to reassume its dominant role.

Our diplomats are clearly not as prepared to fight politically for democracy as our soldiers fought militarily to remove the Taliban and Baathist tyrannies. Yet both are integral parts of the same war, and should be waged with equal conviction and equal intensity. The difference seems to be that our soldiers had no doubt of the legitimacy of the American cause, while the diplomats and strategists — in the Pentagon and the National Security Council as in Foggy Bottom — are afraid to assert it and fight those who challenge it.

We've made a terrible mess. As "riverbend" — another Iraqi blogger — puts it: "This is going to open new doors for repression in the most advanced country on women's rights in the Arab world! Men are also against this (although they certainly have the upper-hand in the situation) because it's going to mean more confusion and conflict all around." But our guys won't risk criticism for being politically incorrect, by fighting for our values, and insisting that our wisdom be used to create a better and freer Middle East.

http://nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200401161303.asp

2 interesting pictures of Sistani; David Warren's and Amir Taheri's.

Warren's Sistani has "tens of thousands of Shia faithful shouting "No to America" and "when he commands the faithful to take to the streets, his orders are echoed in the Friday prayers, and reinforced by stick-wielding zealots."
"He began by counselling Iraqis to co-operate with U.S. and British troops, and by declaring that he had no political aspirations."
"While he still plays the role of a purely religious leader, he has surrounded himself with political operatives. His demands have become more strident, and are now coupled with threats. He adds new demands to further increase the pressure: most recently saying that the snap election must be combined with a referendum on whether U.S. troops should be allowed to stay."

While Taheri paints a different picture of Sistani.He says Sistani's statement is a fatwa, which means an opinion, and not a decree or an edict..."
And he says, "Sistani would be the last person to claim that he has any authority to dictate what the people of Iraq should or should not do."
"The cleric says that holding elections is the "ideal," and not the only, mechanism for forming an interim government"

Warren and Taheri do seem to agree that Sistani shouldn't be allowed to dictate politics. According to Taheri, "Dragging Sistani into politics is bad for Iraq, bad for him, and bad for the Coalition." I agree. And as Taheri writes, "the responsibility for Iraq lies with the Coalition and the Governing Council, not with any theologian or media commentator." And the "Governing Council, believes "that Iraq is not ready for elections."

If that's the view of the Governing Council and the Coalition agrees, then it would seem chairman Pachachi's job, to speak with Sistani and try to persuade him to see things their way. Hopefully it won't take "the Bush administration... pull(ing) off a miracle", as David Warren puts it, in order to resolve this situation.

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