Have Iraqis voted for a dictatorship?
The election should be seen as a manifestation of power that Ali Sistani wields on the Shiite population of Iraq. His decree, making it a religious obligation for Shiite Muslims to vote, was responsible for the huge turnout.
| The Sunnis, recall, imposed a religious obligation not to vote. My own agnostic position would have been to vote if you care about the future of Iraq, but there aren't many (acknowledged) agnostics in Iraq, a country where religious obligations are more important than they are in Western countries. |
The Shiites recognise that the US occupation is a historic opportunity. If they are disciplined and patient they will rule Iraq. Their principal opponents will be quashed by the US itself.
Is it the old Leninist: kto kvo?; who (rules) whom?
| It's also a basic principle of representative government. If you've got a majority, you're going to have a proportionate input in how things are done. |
The Bush administration is under the false impression that the elections in Iraq have heralded the era of democracy in Iraq and thus justify the Bush pre-emption doctrine. What, it seems, they cannot see is that the US has just facilitated a major transfer of power in the Arab World — from Sunnis to Shiites.
| In a majority Shiite country that's been ruled (not governed) by Sunnis... |
Thanks to the US the Arab Shiites will now control Baghdad — the jewel in the Islamic crown — after a millennium. They did not rule over Baghdad even under the glorious Fatimid dynasty (909-1171) that governed Egypt, North Africa and Syria but had only a tenuous hold over Baghdad, briefly under the Buwayhid tribal confederation, before the Turkic Seljuks invaded and captured the city with help from the Abbasids...
Actually, US foreign policy is rooted on a type of enabled inclusivism, which was propped with the intent of eliminating terrorism and Islamic revolution (inqilab), by forcing both the Seculars and Islamists to submit to democratic choice. Reality dictates that when faced with the socio-economic results of their social idiocy, most Muslims point their inherently fanatic fingers at the Seculars (an extinct group in de-Baathist Iraq, and near extinct elsewhere among the slaves-of-allah). Ergo: US facilitation of Islamofascist successes in quasi-democratic process, legitimates that global-genocidal ideology. On Sept. 11, 2001, over 19,000 Islamofascists polluted Egyptian jails. Last I heard, State Dept. clerico-centrist inclusivism has enabled half of that scum to pollute Egypt's streets (if not the streets of Baghdad). I respect the democratic choice of Iraqis, as much as I respect the choice of the Germany majority that once favored Nazism: zero, zip, nada. The problem with Islamofascists is: their lives.
That's a dissertation on theory. When you actually have to make and implement policy you've got to use the materials that're actually available, rather than import theoretical participants. Iraq is a mostly Arab, majority Shiite country, period. There's no way to change that, short of mass deportations like the Assyrians used to do, and setting up colonies of Americans to alter the demographics. So you've got to look at the materials at hand and try to figure what you can do with them.
In the immediate aftermath of Sammy's deposition, the U.S. established al-Khoei as its preferred Shiite holy man. He was quickly bumped off by al-Sadr. SCIRI, the Hakim family business, was seen as an Iranian tool and we went to work on co-opting them. The Bad Guyz have attempted to counter that by bumping off al-Hakims, but luckily there are more of them than there were al-Khoeis. Rather than dismantling MKO, we've kept it in existence to use as a tool against the black hat ayatollahs in Iran. We've done a fairly delicate diplomatic and political dance with Sistani and his handlers, and we've thumped al-Sadr because he's nakedly controlled by the Iranians.
You're making the assumption of a monolithic Shiism, which doesn't apply, not even within Iran. You're also discounting the historic antipathy between the Arabs (to include the Semitic pre-Arabs) and the Iranians (to include the ancient Elamites). Those are all political tools, that are being used by people who're hopefully smart enough to use them. You're looking only at military operations, rather than at the diplomatic picture, which is the more important.
We can't have a policy in the Middle East that doesn't involve Arabs and Muslims. Period. That applies whether you like Islam or not. You have to make all the fine differentiations among the players. If it were not for the advent of Khomeiniism in Iran, the natural Western alliance would have been with the Shiites and Sufis. What we're trying to do now is break off the "friendly" Shia of the Najaf school and isolate the adherents of the Qom school. The Najaf school isn't the one pushing for clerical rule, though I'm sure they expect to have rather more clerical influence than we'd prefer. |
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