The
Iraqi Shiites
On
the history of Americas would-be allies
Juan Cole
8
The ambitious
aim of the American war in Iraqarticulated by Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectualswas
to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics.
The war was notor not principallyabout finding weapons
of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or
protecting the Iraqi population from Saddams terror. For
U.S. policy makers the importance of such a transformation was
brought home by the events of September 11, which challenged U.S.
strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding U.S. alliance
with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush administration
saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy in
the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites,
which would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle
East.
But the Bush administration badly
neglected the history of the group they wanted to claim as their
new ally. Who are the Iraqi Shiites? And how likely are they to
support democracy or U.S. goals in the region? To address these
questions, we will first need some background.
Anti-Communism and the Pillars of U.S. Policy
From 1970 until the
end of the Cold War, U.S. policy in the Middle East was based
on three principles and two key alliances. The principles included
fighting against Communist and other radical anti-American influences;
supporting conservative religious and authoritarian political
elites; and ensuring access to Middle Eastern petroleum supplies.
The two principal allies were Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The centrality of the
anti-Soviet pillar to regional policy is often ignored, but it
helps explain the others. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy,
was a crucial pivot of U.S. policy from the 1970s forward. U.S.
officials viewed its deeply conservative Wahhabi form of Islam
as a barricade against Communism andafter the 1979 Iranian
Revolutionagainst Irans Shiite Khomeinism. Israel,
too, battled leftist and pro-Soviet forces, though its determination
to annex much or all of the territories it captured in 1967 made
it a problematic partner for a United States seeking Arab friends.
The United States could maintain an alliance with both the Zionist
state and the Wahhabi kingdom, even though the two did not care
very much for one another, because both disliked the Soviets and
leftist Palestinians.
Because the Cold War
was a contest of economic systems, winning it depended crucially
on the prosperity of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Inexpensive
energy was essential to their prosperity. And the Saudi alliance
was one key to inexpensive energy. Because of its small population
and unusually large capacity, Saudi Arabia had enormous influence
on the price of petroleum. By pumping extra oil, the Saudis kept
the price lower than other members of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), such as Algeria and Iran, would have
liked. Moreover, Riyadh supported Western European prosperity
by investing (recycling) its petrodollars back into
the West.
The Saudis also bolstered
regional conservatism, in particular by aiding the anti-Communist
Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt from the 1950s forward. In this period
the Brotherhoodformed in 1928 and precursor to contemporary
fundamentalismwas increasingly persecuted by Abdel Nassers
secular Arab socialist state. With Egypt tilting toward the Soviet
Union in the 1960s, Saudi support for the Brotherhood was implicated
in the U.S.Soviet struggle. In the 1970s dictator Anwar
El Sadat shifted Egypt from the political left to the right and
allied with the United States. With U.S. advice he sought a new,
positive relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the Muslim Brotherhood.
When Sadat made peace with Israel, key pieces of U.S. policy fell
into place. (That Sadat was assassinated for taking this direction,
by the very Sunni radicals he had unleashed, was irrelevant to
the outcome, since his new foreign policy remained in effect).
Saudi Arabia remained
central to U.S. policy in the 1980s. It took the lead in the Gulf
in opposing Irans Khomeinist revolution and backed Saddam
Husseins war against Iran, with Washingtons blessing.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan the United States pressured
Saudi Arabia to support the efforts of the Muslim fundamentalist
mujahidin (holy warriors) who volunteered to fight
Moscows troops. In a breathtaking lapse of judgment, the
Reagan administration gave billions of dollars to these groups.
The administration misunderstood the difference between Muslim
traditionalism and conservatism, and the virulent new strands
of Sunni radicalism that were proliferating in the 1980s.
While the United States
was consolidating an alliance with Saudi Arabia, policy toward
Iraq fluctuated wildlythough here, too, anti-Communism was
always the fundamental principle operating in the background.
In the mid-1950s the United States and the British pushed the
Baghdad Pact (signed in 1955), which grouped Iraq, Turkey, Iran,
and Pakistan in an anti-Soviet alliance. This strategy collapsed
in 1958 when Colonel Abdel Karim Qasim staged a bloody coup in
Iraq against the government of Nurias-Said. Washington saw Qasim,
who had Communist allies, as a dangerous radical. It has been
alleged that the United States supported the 1963 failed coup
attempt by the Arab nationalist Baath Party against the officers,
receiving guarantees in return that the Iraqi Communist Party
would be disbanded.
The Baath Party finally came to
power in 1968, and though it did ban the Communists it went on
to have indifferent relations with the United States until the
Iranian Revolution and the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. During
the 1980s the United States threw its support behind Saddam Hussein
and the Baath to combat Khomeinist radicalism, whose rabid anti-Americanism
it saw as aiding the Soviet Union. The U.S.Saddam alliance,
of course, ended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
September 11 and the Iraq Option
With the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Paul Wolfowitz and other national
security hawks later grouped in the Project for a New American
Century saw two principal security challenges to the United States:
the remaining Communist powers in Asia, especially North Korea
but also China, which they wished to see contained or, if possible,
broken up; and the anti-American Middle Eastern states, including
Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The two problems were linked because the
East Asian Communists and the Middle Eastern radical states were
suspected of proliferating missile and nuclear technologies to
one another. Pakistan, for instance, is suspected of helping North
Koreas nuclear program. Wolfowitz likened Chinese sales
of intermediate missiles to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s to the Cuban
missile crisis. Many of them also saw threats to Israels
power as necessarily menacing to U.S. security.
The attacks on September 11 should
have made it clear that the hawks had been looking for threats
in all the wrong places. Iran and Iraq had been effectively contained,
and China was too busy making money off the West to think about
harming its economies. At the same timeand in significant
part as a result of U.S. support for Muslim fundamentalism as
an anti-Communist bulwarkSunni radicalism had emerged as
a much more powerful threat than either East Asian Communism or
Baathism and Khomeinism. Mujahidin who had trained in Afghanistan
fanned back out to their home countries in 1989, victorious, and
determined to establish Islamic states in places like Algeria
and Yemen. Sunni radicals fought a virtual civil war in Algeria
with the secular military government in the 1990s, waged a less
bloody but still highly disruptive campaign against the Mubarak
government in Egypt, and pioneered new militant political movements
such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the neo-Deobandis in Pakistan.
Once the Soviets had fallen the Sunni radicals abandoned their
alliance of convenience with Washington and turned against the
United States, which they now saw as a bulwark of the secular
governments that they were trying to overthrow, in addition to
resenting its role in supporting Israeli expansionism. The more
radical of these groups coalesced into al Qaeda and decided to
hit the far enemy rather than only the near
one.
After September
11 the national security hawks, many of whom who had actively
fostered the jihadis in the 1980s, attempted to link new the forms
of Muslim terrorism to their longstanding preoccupations with
Iraq and Iran. The anti-American Middle Eastern states were now
even more dangerous, they alleged, because they either had joined
up with the terrorists already or might in the future share weapons
of mass destruction with the jihadis for use against the United
States. But the Iraqi Baathists were devoted to secular Arab nationalism,
and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran despised al Qaeda and the Taliban.
It was implausible that Khomeinist Shiites, Baathist Arab nationalists,
and Sunni al Qaeda would collaborate closely with one another
and share deadly technology. Nor was there any good evidence for
it, though plenty was manufactured by innuendo.
The pillars of policy were now
trembling. Some within the Bush circles, especially Secretary
of State Colin Powell, sought a reduced American tolerance for
Israels expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories,
among the main sources of Muslim anger at the United States. Fearful
of this outcome, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused George
Bush in October 2001 of trying to appease Arab countries by forsaking
Israel in the way that Europe had tried to appease Hitler in 1938
by abandoning the Czech Sudetenland. Sharply rebuked, Sharon backed
off quickly, and by late fall of 2001 the Bush administration
had been convinced, by a combination of domestic political calculations
and geopolitical judgments, to remain committed to acquiescing
in substantial expropriations of Palestinian land by Israel.
But
the other central pillar remained in doubt. Some analysts associated
with the administration criticized the Saudi alliance of monarchy
and Wahhabi Islam as dangerously unstable and destabilizing. At
the very least, some wealthy Saudis had given monetary support
to al Qaeda or al Qaedalinked charities. Wahhabi missionizing
in the Muslim world had spread the distinctively Wahhabi ideas
that Muslims who are not strict in their observance are actually
infidels and that non-Muslims are threats to Islam. Some suspected
members of the royal family of having radical sympathies. Richard
Perle, then chairman of the Pentagons Defense Policy Board,
led the charge in arguing that Saudi Arabia should be abandoned
as Americas chief ally in the region. He arranged for a
former associate of conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, Laurent
Murawiec of Rand Corp., to address the Defense Policy Board. Murawiecs
PowerPoint presentation painted Riyadh as the source of all Americas
problems, saying, The Saudis are active at every level of
the terror chain and Saudi Arabia supports our enemies
and attacks our allies. Although Perle attempted to distance
himself from the more extreme of Murawiecs allegations once
a whistle-blower had publicized the secret briefing, he clearly
viewed Saudi Arabia as a problem. In February he told Chris Matthews,
I think at the moment, popular sentiment in Saudi Arabia
is very negative toward the United States. The Independent
reported him as saying, The Saudis are a major source of
the problem we face with terrorism. Even more pragmatic
thinkers such as Wolfowitz decided that it was impractical to
continue to base U.S. troops on Saudi soil, given the resentments
this presence had caused among the Sunni radicals, and that therefore
a new ally would have to be found or created to anchor U.S. military
interests in the Persian Gulf. The increasing sympathy among the
Saudi public for the Palestinians and the Saudi commitment to
Israels return to its 1967 borders reinforced neoconservative
doubts about a continuing close alliance with the House of Saud.
The hawks came to see an Americanized
Iraq as a replacement for Saudi Arabia. The plan was risky, not
least because the secular Baath government had been among the
main ramparts against Sunni and Shiite religious radicalism in
the Gulf. The hawks argued that a liberated Iraq would kick-start
a wave of democratization in the Middle East, paralleling events
in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union weakened and then fell.
(They did not explain why the United States, if it wanted democratization,
did not start with places like Egypt and Jordan, which were more
plausible candidates, being allies, developed civil societies,
and recipients of substantial aid). They believed, incorrectly,
that Iraqs petroleum-producing capacitywhile not at
Saudi levelswas significant enough to offset Saudi dominance
of the oil markets. And unlike Saudi Arabia, Paul Wolfowitz thought,
Iraq did not have holy cities such as Mecca and Medina that would
make the stationing of U.S. troops there objectionable: Iraqis,
he said, dont bring the sensitivity of having the
holy cities of Islam being on their territory. (He apparently
did not then know about the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and
Karbala). The hawks were aware that a democratic Iraq would have
a Shiite majority, but their client, Ahmad Chalabi (head of the
expatriate Iraqi National Congress), convinced them that Iraqi
Shiites were largely secular in mindset and uninterested in a
Khomeinist theocracy. In the short term, they thought, Chalabi
and his Iraqi National Congress would run Iraq in at least a semi-democratic
fashion.
This plan proposed
an almost complete reconfiguring of the old pillars of American
Cold War policy in the region. The two key alliances were now
to be with Israel and a Shiite-majority secular Iraq.
Saudi Arabia would be marginalized and the allegedly pernicious
effects of its Wahhabism fought. Cheap and secure petroleum remained
important, but Iraq would emerge as its principal guarantor. Iranian
Khomeinism was still seen as an enemy, along with its allies,
the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the remaining wing of the Baath in
Syria. All three were seen as threats to Israeli expansionism,
so their elevation in the firmament of evil dovetailed with the
U.S. decision to acquiesce de facto in hard-line Israeli policies
of settlement expansion. Iran and Syria were to be forestalled
from developing biological or nuclear weapons, from cooperating
in this endeavor with the East Asian Communists, and from interfering
in a final settlement of the Palestine issue on whatever terms
Israel found favorable. Fighting al Qaeda, which one would have
thought would have the highest priority in the new policy, actually
appears as a minor and subordinate consideration, relegated to
a sort of police work. And mollifying outraged Muslims by pressuring
Israel to return to the 1967 borders was out of the question.
It is a plan. And like other ambitious
plans it makes many assumptions. But perhaps the largest is that
the Iraqi Shiites are plausible allies.
The Iraqi Shiites
Shiites in Iraq were radicalized
and brutalized by two major events: the Baath crackdown on Shiite
political activity in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the crushing
of the 1991 uprising and subsequent persecution of and even genocide
against Shiites in the South. As a result of
the cruel 1990s, Khomeinist ideas gained far more purchase with
the poverty-stricken and desperate younger generation than a secular
middle-class expatriate like Chalabi could have dreamed. Indeed,
Chalabi left Iraq in 1958 and the beginnings of organized Shiite
politics coincide more or less exactly with the time of his departure.
Shiite religious politics in Iraq
largely date from the founding of the al-Da`wa Party in 1957.
Al-Da`wa sought to establish an Islamic state in Iraq. Among its
major theorists was Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a prominent cleric
and intellectual who dedicated himself to developing a modernist
Shiite ideology that could compete with Marxism.
Although Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
developed his theory of clerical rule (vilayat-i faqih)
while in exile in Najaf (19641978), it did not become immediately
popular among most clerics there. Najaf had long been a center
of seminary education and clerical jurisprudence, and lay Shiites
generally followed its leading scholar, called an Object of Emulation,
in matters of religious law. Shiites of this branch believed that
the Prophet Muhammads successors or vicars were his cousin
and son-in-law, Ali, and the eleven lineal descendants of Ali
and the Prophets daughter, Fatima. The twelfth of these
vicars or Imams was held to have disappeared into
a supernatural realm, from which he would one day return. In the
absence of the hidden Twelfth Imam, the mainstream of the Shiite
tradition gradually turned to trained clergymen as their leaders.
Although scholastic Twelver Shiism (the branch practiced in Iran
and Iraq) had as its ideal that the laity would follow the rulings
of the single most learned and upright Object of Emulation, in
fact there were always several contenders for the position. Religious
authority was thus multiple. There was no Shiite pope, even if
the theorists of clerical authority sometimes seemed to wish for
one. Moreover, the Shiite tradition of thinking about political
power did not envisage that clerics would exercise direct political
power. In the medieval and early modern periods most clerics heaped
fulsome praise on Shiite monarchs who defended the faith. Khomeinis
thought was revolutionary. He maintained that monarchy is incompatible
with Islam, and he insisted that in the absence of the Hidden
Twelfth Imam, the clergy should rule. Khomeini taught the guardianship
of the jurisprudent. At the top of the Islamic government,
as head of state, should stand a clerical jurisprudent who would
safeguard the interests of Shiite Islam. Laypersons could serve
in parliament and even as president, but supreme power would be
in clerical hands. This vision differed deeply from the lay versions
of Muslim fundamentalism, which wanted a medieval interpretation
of Islamic law to become the law of the land but did not give
any special place in the governmental system to Muslim clergymen.
While many clerics
in the Najaf tradition wanted a state governed by Islamic principles,
they rejected Khomeinis idea that clerics themselves should
rule. Moreover, Iraqs own theorist of Islamic government,
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, envisaged an elected assembly that need
not be made up of clerics. Thus, the initial Iraqi Shiite idea
of an Islamic state was at odds with the Khomeinist theory that
came to dominate Iran in 1979.
In response to the
large Shiite demonstrations of 1977 and the Islamic Revolution
in Iran of 1979, the Baath repressed Shiite religious parties
and leaders relentlessly. They hanged al-Sadr in 1980 and made
membership in the al-Da`wa Party a capital crime. Many al-Da`wa
members were arrested and the party went deep underground, expanding
its cell organization even as it dispersed geographically.
In the 1980s and 1990s al-Da`wa
had several bases. One group of members and leaders took refuge
in Iran. Another was based in London. Inside Iraq, the organization
remained strong in the Middle Euphrates region (in southern Iraq),
especially around Nasiriya. The Basra branch, called Tanzim al-Da`wa,
rejected Khomeinism. These branches were not in good contact with
one another and developed quite differently with regard to ideology
and organization.
The pro-Khomeini Islamic
Jihad group, linked to al-Da`wa and based in Lebanon and
Iran, blew up the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in late
1983 and hijacked a Kuwaiti airliner a year later. (In this period
of the Iran-Iraq War, the United States and Kuwait were backing
Saddam Hussein). Islamic Jihad may have been a splinter group
or it may have been a covert paramilitary operation of the Tehran-based
al-Da`wa Party. But to the extent that al-Da`wa itself engaged
in violence and took credit for it, the target was the Baath in
Iraq.
As many as 200,000 Iraqi Shiites
ended up in political exile in Iran over the course of the 1980s
and 1990s. Many of these exiles joined the Iran-based al-Da`wa,
which tended to accept Khomeinis idea of clerical rule.
But the organization was riven by internal fighting over the partys
relationship to the Supreme Jurisprudent. Clerical
leaders of the al-Da`wa seemed especially attracted by Khomeinism,
while the lay leaders insisted on maintaining the partys
autonomy from the Supreme Jurisprudent. The question had implications
for al-Da`was future. Was it to become a mere appendage
of Tehran or remain an Iraqi party with a distinctive ideology?
Some clerical members of the partys central committee, such
as Muhammad Mahdi Asefi and Sayyid Kazim al-Haeri, wanted the
party to put itself under the direct authority of Khomeini and
then his successor, Ali Khamenei. This step would have entailed
dissolving the party into the Iranian Hezbollah. Khomeini himself
reportedly showed no enthusiasm for this step, and the lay members
of the executive committee were also unwilling to subordinate
themselves to the religious institution. The issue festered inside
the party throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s in Iran.
In 2000 Asefi was forced to resign as party leader over his continued
attempts to put it under the authority of Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent
Ali Khamenei.
The al-Da`wa branch
in London (led by Abo Ali and Ibrahim Jaafari) had a more lay
cast. It also had the greatest freedom of movement, and so the
center of gravity of the party moved away from Iran.
The circumstances for
al-Da`wa were worst within Iraq. During and after the postGulf
War uprising of 1991, thousands of al-Da`wa members or alleged
members were arrested, executed, and buried in mass graves.
Of course, al-Da`wa was not the
only Iraqi Shiite group, and in 1982 Shiite activists in Iran,
attempting to create an umbrella movement for the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein, founded the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI), with al-Da`wa as one of the constituent organizations.
In 1984 Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, member of a leading Iraqi Shiite
family and an associate of al-Sadr, became the head of SCIRI (also
called SAIRI). The same year, al-Da`wa broke with SCIRI in order
to maintain its independence. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim accepted
Khomeinis theory of clerical rule. SCIRI took credit for
bombings and assassination plots against the Baath in Baghdad.
It organized a militia, the Badr Brigade, which carried out attacks
across the Iranian border into Iraq. This paramilitary, trained
and armed by Irans Revolutionary Guards, over time grew
to become the Badr Corps, consisting of 10,000 fighters by the
late 1990s. In the 1990s, SCIRI and the Iranian al-Da`wa developed
a deadly rivalry, to the point that (according to rumors) al-Da`wa
members targeted Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim himself.
The London-based branch
of al-Da`wa was drawn into the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in
19921995. Iraqi financier Ahmad Chalabi had founded the
INC as an umbrella group after the Gulf War, with CIA help and
funds (via the Rendon Group). Chalabi had had to flee Jordan for
London in the late 1980s under suspicion of massive embezzlement
from the bank he headed there. A secular Shiite, he worked in
London in the 1990s to unite 19 organizations grouping religious
Shiites, their secular coreligionists, Sunni Arabs (including
ex-Baathists), and Kurds. The INC managed to include both al-Da`wa
and al-Hakims SCIRI for a while.
But al-Da`wa left the
INC in 1995, in part over disputes with the Kurds, who wanted
to see Iraq transformed into a loose federation, whereas al-Da`wa
favored a strong central state. The Kurds in turn fell into a
bitter civil war around the same time, and the INC was torn apart
by infighting. The CIA and the State Department gradually distanced
themselves from it, because of unaccounted-for monies, though
the INC and Chalabi remained in the good graces of Paul Wolfowitz
and other American neoconservatives. The INCs fortunes improved
when the hawks took back the Defense Department in 2001. In the
aftermath of September 11 Chalabi managed to put back together
a coalition of SCIRI, the Kurdish groups, and others, though al-Da`wa
generally kept its distance.
In the meantime, inside
Iraq, Saddams government appeared determined to wipe out
Iraqi Shiism. It tried to draw Shiites away to secular Baathism
and launched cruel attacks on recalcitrant villages in the south.
Some 500,000 marsh Arabs of the Madan tribesfishermen, farmers
and smugglersemployed their swamps to hide from the Baathist
troops and to conduct hit-and-run guerrilla operations against
them. They were organized by the Iraqi Hezbollah, or Party of
God, and received some Iranian help. They also sometimes coordinated
with SCIRIs Badr Corps, which infiltrated the swamps from
Iran. In response Baath engineers built dams and irrigation works
that drained the swamps. By the early 21st century only 10 percent
of the swamps survived; the rest had turned to dust. The marsh
Arabs were scattered, some to nearby villages and towns as dirt-poor
laborers, others to exile in Iran.
Many Shiites with a
village-tribal background had also settled in East Baghdads
al-Thawrah township, which had been founded by military dictator
al-Qasim in 1962. Dwelling in grinding poverty and largely deprived
of the benefits of Iraqs petroleum bonanza, they often rioted
against the Baath, with particular force in 1977 and 1991. In
each case they met vicious repression. By the 1990s their population
had swelled to some two million, nearly 10 percent of the country.
They retained some tribal ties and organization in their new urban
environment and began turning away from folk Shiism to a more
scholastic urban religious outlook.
In scholastic Shiism
each believer must choose a prominent clergyman and follow his
rulings on the minutiae of religious law, such as Since
perfume has alcohol in it, and alcohol is forbidden, may a Shiite
wear perfume? The most popular and authoritative such clergyman,
or Object of Emulation, had usually been the foremost scholar
in the shrine and seminary city of Najaf. In the 1960s it was
Muhsin al-Hakim, and then the torch passed to Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei.
After al-Khoeis
death in 1992, however, a generation gap developed. Older Shiites
tended to follow al-Khoeis disciple, Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, who was originally from Iran. A quietist, he rejected
involvement in politics and rejected Khomeinis theory of
clerical rule. The new generation, however, was attracted to a
younger, activist scholar named Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. A cousin
of the martyred theorist of Islamic government in Iraq, Muhammad
Baqir al-Sadr, Sadiq emerged as a political organizer of some
genius. He established networks of believers loyal to him in Basra,
East Baghdad, Kufa, and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.
Although he did not have Sistanis seniority, he also lacked
the elder mans timidity. In the 1990s Sadr II, as he became
known, repeatedly defied Saddam.
Saddam had attempted
to outlaw Friday prayers among the Shiites. Sadr II insisted on
leading them, and established a network of mosques in the slums
of East Baghdad where congregants furtively gathered on Friday
afternoons. Sadr II compared Saddam to a tyrannical medieval caliph
who persecuted the Shiites of his day. He organized informal Shiite
religious courts throughout the country and tried to convince
tribal Shiites to come under the sway of formal jurisprudence.
He denounced women, including Christians, who dared go out unveiled.
He lambasted his followers if they wore clothing with Western
labels. He preached against Israel. He accepted Khomeinis
theory of the rule of the jurisprudent, and may have had his eye
on the position for himself in Iraq.
Sadr II gained some two million
followers for his militant, Khomeini-style Shiism. Then, after
warning him to fall silent, Saddams secret police assassinated
him and two of his sons in February of 1999. The South erupted
in riots, which were, predictably, put down by the jackboot.
The Shiites Under Occupation
Sadr IIs young
son, Muqtada al-Sadr, was heir to a family tradition of martyrdom.
Married to the orphaned daughter of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (Sadr
I), he went underground in Kufa and East Baghdad, continuing his
fathers networking and organizing among young Shiite slum
dwellers. The American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003
proved to be a windfall for him. Even before the Baath fell on
April 9, his followers had expelled the party from East Baghdad,
which they renamed Sadr City. Muqtadas young clerical devotees
reopened mosques and other Shiite institutions, established neighborhood
militias, captured arms and ammunitions from Baath depots, took
over hospitals, and asserted local authority in East Baghdad,
Kufa, and some neighborhoods of Najaf, Karbala, and Basra. They
engaged in crowd politics, calling for frequent demonstrations
against the Anglo-American occupation in Baghdad, Basra, and Najaf,
sometimes managing to get out crowds of 5,000 to 10,000.
In the meantime, the
al-Da`wa Party reemerged in Nasiriya, Basra, and elsewhere, though
not nearly on the scale of the Sadr II bloc. The London-based
branch of al-Da`wa, which had been willing to cooperate with the
Americans, emerged as the most prominent, hooking back up with
cell members in Nasiriya and Basra. Many figures associated with
the Iranian branch remained in Tehran, unwilling to return to
an Iraq under American dominance. The attempt of the heir to the
al-Khoei name, Abd al-Majid al-Khoei, to come back and assert
authority in Najaf (probably with U.S. backing) failed when he
was cut down by a Sadrist mob in April. SCIRI leaders returned
to Iraq in April and May, and their Badr Corps fighters slipped
back into the country from Iran, establishing themselves in eastern
cities, such as Baquba and Kut, near the Iranian border. They
failed to get much purchase in East Baghdad or other Sadrist areas,
however. Although SCIRI proved willing to work with the Americans,
the Badr Corps often clashed with U.S. troops in Baquba and elsewhere.
Both the Sadr II bloc
and SCIRI sought a clerically dominated Islamic republic in Iraq,
though with different announced strategies. Muqtada was plain-spoken
about the goal and refused to cooperate with the United States
in attaining it. SCIRI, in contrast, thought in terms of a two-step
process. Badr Corps commander Abdul Aziz al-Hakim articulated
the process in a television interview, saying that Iraqis would
first choose a pluralistic government, but in the long term the
Shiite majority would opt for an Islamic republic. This plan resembled
the machinations of Communist parties in the early 20th century
who collaborated with the national bourgeoisie to establish postcolonial
states but aimed for ultimate Communist dictatorship.
The destruction of
the Baathist regime did not end the longstanding fights among
its opponents. SCIRI, the Sadr II Bloc, al-Da`wa, and followers
of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani conducted an underground war against
one another, struggling for control of key symbolic spaces. Chief
among these were the shrine of Imam Husayn (martyred grandson
of the Prophet Muhammad) in Karbala and the shrine of Imam Ali
(the Prophets cousin and son-in-law) in Najaf. Sadrists
fought followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for the right
to preach sermons at the mosque of al-Husayn. In late July Sadrist
mobs demonstrated in front of the Karbala shrine against U.S.
presence in the city, and the Marines responded to gunfire by
firing into the crowd, killing at least one and wounding nine.
The Sadrists, knowing the power of the martyrs shrine as
a symbol of resistance to outsiders, provoked the clueless Marines.
In Najaf reports surfaced throughout the summer of Sadrist thugs
beating up aides and relatives of Sistani and the clerics around
him and taking over many of the citys seminaries. In July
Sadrists invaded the religious properties administration of the
Sunnis in Basra, raising alarms among that minority that the Sadrists
intended to usurp mosques and other property. Some 15,000 Sunnis
demonstrated against this threat. Sadrists were also implicated
in fomenting anti-coalition rioting in Basra on August 910.
Muqtada al-Sadr called
in mid-July for the establishment of an alternative Iraqi government
and army to compete with the U.S.-appointed body. But both SCIRI
and al-Da`wa, despite their own deep differences, accepted posts
on the Interim Governing Council appointed by U.S. civil administrator
Paul Bremer on July 13. Indeed, persons with al-Da`wa ties gained
four of the 25 seats, and SCIRI was given a seat as well. When
Iraqis go to the polls, if the Sadrists are willing to field candidates
they are likely to do very well. SCIRI and al-Da`wa seem to have
fewer enthusiasts and may be challenged in translating their tactical
alliance with the United States into parliamentary clout.
On August 29 a huge
truck bomb in Najaf killed SCIRI leader Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim
and nearly 100 others. Most suspicion fell on remnants of Saddams
Baath Party or on Sunni radicals affiliated in some way with al
Qaeda. Badr Corps militiamen came out into the streets of Najaf
and some other cities, insisting on mounting armed patrols. Abdul
Aziz al-Hakim, the slain ayatollahs brother, became the
head of SCIRI and angrily called for an immediate American withdrawal
from Iraq, given that it had failed so miserably to restore security.
Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a moderate cleric with ties to the Khoei
Foundation and the al-Da`wa Party, immediately suspended his membership
in the Interim Governing Council in protest. The leader of the
Council of Sunni Clergymen charged that in the aftermath, the
followers of Muqtada al-Sadr were fomenting anti-Sunni violence
and had usurped Sunni mosques in Najaf and Karbala. The potential
for serious Shiite-Sunni clashes down the road cannot be ruled
out.
To be sure, secular
Iraqi Shiites also exist, and in fair numbers. But the years of
Saddams terror have helped to generate a powerful Khomeinist
current in Iraqi Shiism. Al-Da`wa, SCIRI, and the Sadrists all
want an Islamic republic, and two of the three endorse Khomeinis
rule of the jurisprudent. Ironically, Wolfowitz visited
Najaf and Karbala in the second half of July and inadvertently
set off a riot in Najaf. The U.S. Marines increased their security
for his visit, which came a day after Muqtadas fiery sermon
calling for the establishment of a shadow government and popular
Shiite militia. The increased security raised fears among Sadrists
that the United States planned to arrest him (which is, after
all, what Saddam would have done). The rumor of such an attempted
arrest provoked demonstrations by thousands of Sadrists late on
a Saturday, after Wolfowitz had left. They were repeated on Sunday,
until the crowds were convinced that Muqtada had not been bothered.
Conclusion
In removing the Baath regime and
eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, the United States has
unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the upsurge of
civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by American
neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build
an Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence
of the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites
and the Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected
a different result only by ignoring that history.
To be sure, the dreams
of a Shiite Islamic republic in Baghdad may be unrealistic: a
plurality of the country is Sunni, and some proportion of the
14 million Shiites is secularist. In the months after the Anglo-American
invasion, however, the religious Shiite parties demonstrated the
clearest organizational skills and established political momentum.
The Islamists are likely to be a powerful enough group in parliament
that they may block the sort of close American-Iraqi cooperation
that the neoconservatives had hoped for. The spectacle of Wolfowitzs
party heading out of Najaf just before the outbreak of a major
demonstration of 10,000 angry Sadrists, inadvertently provoked
by the Americans, may prove an apt symbol for the American adventure
in Iraq. The August 29 bombing in Najaf deeply shook the confidence
of Shiites in the American ability to provide them security, and
provoked anger against the United States that will take some time
to heal.
In addition, the Saudis cannot
be pushed out of the oil picture so easily. It will be years before
Iraq can produce much more than three to five million barrels
a day. A good deal of that petroleum, and much of the profit from
it, will be needed for internal reconstruction and debt servicing.
It would take a decade and a half to two decades for Iraqi capacity
to achieve parity with that of the Saudis (11 million barrels
a day), and even then they will not have the Saudis low
overhead and smaller native population. The Saudis can choose
to produce only seven million of the 76 million barrels of petroleum
pumped in the world every day, or they can produce 11 million.
That flexibility, along with their clout in the OPEC cartel, lets
them exercise a profound influence on the price, and Iraq will
not be able to counterbalance it soon. Neoconservative fears about
Saudi complicity with al Qaeda are also overdrawn, since the Saudi
elite feels as threatened by the Sunni radicals as the United
States does. High Saudi officials have even expressed regret about
their past support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which they now
see as dangerous in a way that mainstream Wahhabism is not. (Would
that Reaganite supporters of the mujahidin were similarly contrite!)
So the U.S. alliance with the House of Saud, however badly shaken
by September 11 and Wahhabi radicalism, will provide an essential
foundation for world petroleum stability into the indefinite future.
For now, the United
States is back to having two footstools in the Middle East: Israel
and Saudi Arabia. Iraq has proven too rickety, too unknown, too
devastated to bear the weight of the strategic shift imagined
by the hawks. And far from finally defeating Khomeinism, U.S.
policy has given it millions of liberated Iraqi allies. Their
new Iraqi Interim Governing Council has declined to recognize
Israel, citing Iraqs membership in the Arab League and lack
of genuine progress toward a Palestinian state. Al Qaeda and allied
terrorist threats were not countered by the invasion of Iraq.
Whether Iraqs
Sunnis will turn to radicalism and reinforce al Qaeda is as yet
unknown. But what does seem clear is that the Iraq war has proved
a detour in the War on Terror, drawing away key resources from
the real threat of al Qaeda and continued instability in Afghanistan.
The old pillars have proven more resilient than the hawks imagined.
What really needs to be changed are U.S. support for political
authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism, and acquiescence in
Israeli land grabs on the West Bank. Those two, together, account
for most of the trouble the United States has in the Muslim world.
The Iraq war did nothing to change that. <
Juan Cole is professor of
modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University
of Michigan. He has authored, edited or translated 13 books, most
recently Sacred
Space and Holy War.
Originally
published in the October/November 2003 issue of Boston Review
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