The Mullah Behind the Curtain
MSNBC - WEB EXCLUSIVE
Michael Hirsh
Jan. 17, 2004
Granted vast authority under the U.S. occupation, L. Paul Bremer has been the most powerful man in Iraq for the past seven months. But that is changing fast—almost hourly. Indeed the new Iraqi era that America set in motion last March is hurtling ahead so fast that one can barely keep up with it.
Bremer may still hold the title of Iraq’s civil administrator. But the most powerful man in Iraq at the moment is actually the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the reclusive Shiite cleric from the southern city of Najaf who persistently refuses to meet with Bremer. That’s not necessarily bad news for the Americans. Sistani’s obstinacy has little to do with a cloistered or backward mentality, which is how some frustrated U.S. officials characterize his thinking. It has everything to do with the fact that, while Sistani claims he knows nothing about politics (he resolutely stayed out of it during Saddam’s rule), he is proving to be the most brilliant politician in Iraq. Indeed, if Sistani continues his current strategy of mild confrontation with Washington, the aging ayatollah—who is described as “frighteningly intelligent” by one political ally—will likely emerge as the most dominant and revered figure in post-occupation Iraq. He is also likely to be the man (and here’s the good news) who can best realize the dreams of both his fellow Shiites and the Americans: creating a stable democracy that could potentially transform the Arab world.
But if the Bush administration is to make an ally of Sistani—and it really has no choice but to do so, though this will never be an intimate relationship—it must better understand the political game he is playing. This means, first, stomaching some unpleasant realities. Today anti-Americanism has become smart politics around the world. Much as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won re-election in Germany by playing the anti-American card, and President Roh Moo Hyun hoisted himself to prominence in South Korea’s politics by bashing Washington, a successful national campaign in most countries today means distancing yourself from the much-resented superpower. And more: standing up to it.
Sistani knows this, say sources in Baghdad who talk with him. He has watched as the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which sits behind high concrete blast walls in central Baghdad in the shadow of Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, has developed little or no credibility with Iraqis, in part because the Council consists largely of exiles appointed by the Americans. Ahmad Chalabi, the Shiite exile whom Pentagon hawks once saw as a potential future president (and compliant U.S. ally), is today despised by many Iraqis and has no chance of winning an election. The eagerness with which some in the Bush administration went about putting an all-American stamp on the occupation, slighting the need for UN or multilateral cover while hoping to inspire an I-love-Uncle Sam gratitude in the hearts of Iraqis, has blown up in their faces. It is a destroyed dream that cannot be put back together.
To his credit Bremer appears to see this, and he’s adjusting—fast. On Monday he will come knocking at the door of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and one hopes it is with an appropriate display of humility. Bremer, whose task may be the most difficult of any American diplomat since Ben Franklin went hat in hand to France, has a lot of repair work to accomplish, considering all the damage his overseers back in Washington have done to U.S.-UN relations. As recently as a few weeks ago, the Bush administration had little time for Annan or the United Nations. The world body was given no role in a Nov. 15 agreement that set a timetable for a handover of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30. Now Annan could well play the decisive part in orchestrating a compromise between Bremer and Sistani—or what is more important, in creating a face-saving way to do so.
Sistani issued a fatwa demanding direct elections to form the nation’s new transitional assembly, which is to be elected by the end of May and will formally assume power from Bremer and the Governing Council. And he has threatened not to recognize the national body if his demands are not met, a potentially devastating blow to Bush's plans for Iraq. Bremer and most Council members say there simply isn’t time to conduct national elections properly. Instead, eager to quell the anti-American insurgency that has threatened George W. Bush’s own re-election hopes, last fall they hurriedly conceived a plan to hold “caucuses” of elites in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces that would select members of the new assembly.
But just as he doesn’t like the taint of U.S. occupation, Sistani doesn’t like the anti-democratic smell of caucuses. This has much to do, no doubt, with the fact that Shiites represent a large majority in Iraq and with the Shiites’ painful historical memory of the oppressive rule they have endured under Iraq’s Sunni minority. Now, with a studied disingenuousness, Sistani is throwing America’s prize values back in its face. “He keeps on saying ‘I’m not a politician, I’m apolitical,’” says one Iraqi Shiite politician who talks with Sistani frequently. “He says, ‘I read this textbook of democracy in the world, and the first thing I read is about elections, and so I’m asking for elections. I didn’t go to the Koran, there is nothing written in the Koran about elections.’”
Yet Sistani is also quite pragmatic, with a long view of the future and a reasonableness that has won over even some Sunnis and Kurds. Not for him the anti-American bellicosity of Moqtada Sadr, a rival Shiite cleric whose diatribes have marginalized him in the eyes of many Iraqis, not to mention the CPA. Agitate and defy the Americans, yes, but not so much that you might delay their departure six months from now, or cause their wrath to fall on your head in some other way. So Sistani is quite willing to cut a deal, sources close to him say. The problem is that since he has come out publicly against the caucuses, he needs a face-saving way to tell his Shiite flock that he is not backing down.
That’s where Kofi Annan comes in. Several weeks ago Sistani signaled his flexibility by summoning Shiite notables to his base of power in Najaf. “He said, ‘I do not mind looking into an alternative to [direct] elections on the proviso that it would be inclusive and preserve the representation and the transfer” of power, according to the Shiite politician. Sistani’s alternative? Local Shiite referendums to select delegates. But he wants Annan to send a U.N. team to affirm that broader national elections are not possible at this point, given the lack of a national census and voter registration, and to supervise the delegate selection. The aura of international legitimacy—as opposed to a U.S. diktat—conveyed by the world body would give Sistani the cover he needs. (As further evidence, consider that Sistani was quite willing to meet Bremer’s junior partner, the martyred U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, last June.) “If it happens just under the [CPA] then whatever the result is, everybody will say again this was made by the Americans, just like the Governing Council,” says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Council.
In recent days Bremer too has signaled that referendums of some kind are doable, and he and Annan will no doubt be discussing them on Monday. But Bremer still has some distance to travel. With a bit of diplomatic tinkering—and a central role by the UN, with perhaps some Arab League participation—Sistani will back a new plan for picking an assembly, sources say. But he still won’t call the result “caucuses,” and Bremer might do well to drop the word, at least in his public comments.
This all sounds like small stuff, back-room politicking over technical issues. But what will be negotiated over the next weeks between Sistani and Bremer, with Annan in the middle, could well determine Iraq’s long-term future and define America’s stature in the Arab world.
The stakes could not be higher. Suspicions remain in the Bush administration that Sistani’s long-term goal is to get the Americans out and the Koran in—in other words, to create another mullah state as in Iran. That is unlikely. In fact, some Iraqis say, the Americans don’t fully comprehend the historic gift Sistani is offering them, if only they have the wisdom to take it. The grand ayatollah and the millions of Shiites who revere him “have made a paradigm shift” away from the militancy of Hezbollah, their traditional political voice, and towards the Americans and the international system of democratic capitalism that Washington oversees, says a Sistani ally in Baghdad. The Americans, he says, have not yet “seen the distance the Shia traveled over to them.” If Washington plays it right, this change in sensibility in the Shiite world could prove to be George W. Bush’s most signal victory in the war on terror.
Sistani’s personal history is a window into the significance of this shift. Born in Iran—he moved to Iraq in the early 1950s—Sistani has seen up close the failures of the Shiite mullah state next door. He, like other Iraqi Shiites, has also seen the failures of Arab nationalism-which is how Sunni minority elites have justified their rule in the Arab world but which has led only to autocracy, poverty and the angry-young-man rage that produces terrorism. The last, best alternative may be a moderate, Shiite-dominated democracy, brokered and blessed by Sistani and conceived with a nuanced federalism that will give the Kurds, Sunnis and others their due. Even some Iraqi liberals note happily that Sistani evinces no desire to actually run the country like the Iranian mullahs, and they support the idea of a secular-run Iraq under an Islamic umbrella, as Baghdad University professor Muhammed Al-Da’mi puts it. The rise of a moderate Shiism in Iraq will unsettle U.S. allies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Jordan. But it will also help to undercut the radical, anti-Shia, anti-Americanism of Osama bin Laden’s Sunni radicalism. And for the Americans who went to war in Iraq hoping for historic change, the Sistani option is pretty much all that’s left on the table.
Let’s hope that Washington has the wisdom to seize it. In six months Bush and Bremer will set free a new Iraq over which they will have very little control. In Iraq today there is no Hamid Karzai, the secular, Westernized Afghan leader who was handed the reins by Washington and has proved a powerful unifying force and ally ever since. Perhaps the scariest thing about today’s Iraq, from America’s strategic point of view, is not the ongoing insurgency but the almost universal consensus in Baghdad that there is no Iraqi political leader, even on the horizon, with the stature to unite this fractious country democratically. Except the quiet ayatollah from Najaf.
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