Informed Comment

*Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated in Baghdad Monday morning against the leadership meeting held under American auspices. The demonstration was boycotted, however, by the powerful Sadr Movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr. They said they wanted to get involved on neither side. The Sadr spokesman, Adnan Shahmani, said that the Sadriyyun did not object to the US removing Saddam and weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, but if the American presence became an occupation, they would resist it. He also said that the Sadr Movement recognizes as the highest religious authority in Shiism not Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani but rather Kazim al-Ha’iri, who has been exiled in Qom for many years. Al-Shahmani maintains that the late Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr had urged his followers to turn to al-Ha’iri when he, al-Sadr, died. He characterized Sistani and his followers as quietist traditionalists, but said the Sadr movement is activist and deeply involved in society, and so is progressive. This statement seems to be code for the Sadrists wanting a Shiite-ruled religious state in Iraq. He dismissed the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the al-Da`wa party as having no standing inside the county (i.e. he sees them as expatriate parties with a shallow membership basis inside Iraq itself).

*Thanks to those of you who saw me on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer Monday evening and sent kind responses. The guests, Michael Hudson, Fawaz Gerges, and I were interviewed by Margaret Warner and were discussing the issues around Islam and democracy in Iraq. I think we all agreed it was possible, but only if it was inclusive and not seen as a mainly American project.

*The leadership meeting in Baghdad sponsored by Jay Garner attracted more than 250 Iraqi notables–mainly technocrats and academics. (Ironically, these are precisely the sort of people the Republican Right tries to marginalize over here in the US :-) They, or at least their sponsoring organizations, had been selected by Garner himself. It was not a representative meeting. Exiles were over-represented. Shiites were under-represented. The Da`wa Party and the Sadr Movement, two of the largest political groupings, refused to be involved. Al-Da`wa has said it will not cooperate with a military administration; Garner’s reporting line goes back to the Pentagon. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, refuses to meet with the Americans. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq did deign to send a “low-level” delegation. Since the Shiites form a majority of the country, and since the religious parties are among the more organized sections of the community, leaving them out would be a huge mistake. Setting things up so that they feel they cannot on principle attend is also a huge mistake.

*There is trouble looming in Iraq between religious Shiites and religious Sunnis. Despite the demonstrations in Baghdad on Monday calling for Iraqi unity and for an early departure by the US, the mixture of religion and politics will be potent. The Financial Times reports, “Mahmud al-Issawi, deputy head of the Higher Islamic Council, a Sunni representative body, claimed on Sunday that his community formed a majority in Iraq. Nearly every other observer believes the Shia represent at least 60 per cent of the population. ‘Of course we want an Islamic government. But we do not want to swap one form of tyranny for another – like in Iran,’ he said.” The Sunni Arabs have lorded it over the Shiites for hundreds of years in Iraq, and if they attempt to go on doing so, there will be blood in the streets. But al-Issawi is quite right that the Sunnis are not going to agree to rule by ayatollahs, or the implementation of Shiite law, either. Shiites often seem not to realize how offensive such developments would be to Iraqi Sunnis. I have a bad feeling about this.

*Al-Hayat says that the US Marines have emptied a large dam near Kut that had been built at Saddam’s orders to dry out the swamps of the south, where the Shiite Marsh Arabs lived. Only 10% of the Iraqi marshlands survive according to satellite photos. The dam served no practical purpose other than to dry out the south and hurt the Shiites, who were rebelling against Saddam.

*The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) may participate in some way in the leadership meeting called by Jay Garner for Monday in Baghdad. The last such meeting, in Nasiriya last week, was boycotted by all the major Shiite groups. The al-Dawa Party and the Sadr movement are determined to boycott Monday’s meeting. The Dawa Party objects to Garner’s reporting line going back to the US military. If the Baghad meeting has substantial Shiite representation, Garner’s process will have been partially validated. But if it is like Nasiriya, mainly Sunnis and Christians, it could be the start of a disaster. If you cut people out, they become spoilers. That is what happened at Mogadishu, i.e. Black Hawk Down. Aidid was cut out by the then coalition, and he attacked the US troops.

*Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi says that “No Iranian officials have suggested the formation of an Iranian-style government in Iraq.” Iran is quite divided, with Kharrazi being a relative liberal in Iranian terms. It is the hardliners in Iran who follow Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei who want a theocracy in Iraq. But even many hardliners are making conciliatory noises, at least, toward the Americans. In contrast, Khamenei recently shot down talk of reopening relations with the US. He called such talk “treason and stupidity.” One remark I thought was funny came from a hardliner who responded to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s warnings to Iraq’s neighbors not to try to intervene in the country. The Iranian cleric said “The US is complaining about outside interference in Iraq?!”

Rumsfeld’s desperate posturing about outside interference is meant to cover up his own mistakes. He was the one who insisted that the US and British go into southern Iraq with a very light force. He was right that it was sufficient militarily. But then they couldn’t keep order in the cities when the Baath was toppled suddenly, producing all that rioting and the looting of the Iraqi Museum and Library. Worse, their thinness on the ground allowed Shiite militias to move into the vacuum, some of them backed by Iran. This is a direct result of the Rumself commitment to light, mobil military forces. So Rumsfeld erred, and he is in part trying to cover up his mistake by attempting to intimidate Iranian leaders.

*Asharq al-Awsat reports that the US army has presided over the creation of a new city council for the northern city of Mosul, made up of city notables. The names will be released shortly. This sort of process is going on throughout the country, and is all to the good. But what caught my eye is that the Mosul city council has started a campaign to disarm the inhabitants of the city, including the Kurdish fighters (peshmerga). The process of buying back or confiscating weapons from the civilian population could be extremely important to returning Iraq to normal. Of course, this process itself implies that order can be provided in some other way than by citizen militias. In Mosul the GIs and the Mosul police are doing joint patrols. (Since Mosul is a northern, Sunni, city, perhaps more of its old Baath police force is acceptable to people than would be the case in the Shiite south; and not every traffic cop under Saddam was necessarily complicit in war crimes).

*Craig Smith of the New York Times has reported very interesting and significant developments in the Sadr Movement in Iraq. It appears that the movement has now recognized Shaikh Kazim al-Haeri as its ultimate spiritual head. He is an older Ayatollah with the authority to issue authoritative rulings, and he favors a Khomeinist style government in Iraq. He recognized Muqtada al-Sadr as his deputy in Iraq. Al-Sadr is enormously popular but is only in his late twenties or at most 30, and does not have the standing to issue fatwas or rulings for the laity. He had earlier been insisting that people follow the rulings of his deceased father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who had been assassinated by the Baathists. But in the Usuli Shiism that predominates in Iraq, it is not permissible to follow the rulings of a deceased jurisprudent. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Muqtada’s rival, had circulated a criticism to that effect some weeks ago. In response, Muqtada appears to have secretly reached out to Ayatollah Kazim Haeri, still in Iran. He received the appointment as Haeri’s deputy around April 8 and was told to cut off the Saddamists and the second-rung Saddamists. This instruction may have had something to do with the killing of American-backed cleric Abd al-Majid Khu’i on April 10. For some time, Muqtada’s links to Haeri had been kept secret. Now they are being openly revealed and members of the Sadr Movement are displaying Haeri’s picture through Najaf and eastern Baghdad. It now transpires that Shaykh Muhammad Fartusi, sermonizer at the al-Hikmah mosque, had been sent there not by Sistani but by Haeri. He was arrested Monday and detained briefly by US troops because they found a handgun in his car as he returned to Baghdad from Najaf. (Khu’i is also said to have been armed with a hand gun. Bush finally got his wish–he is now in a cowboy movie, set in Iraq, with the ayatollahs playing the sheriffs and outlaws!) Fartusi’s detention sparked demonstrations by thousands of Shiites and the intervention of the other clerics induced the US to release him. He is openly contemptuous of the US, and told an interviewer from Dubai he was beaten and that the US detention was worse that the sort Saddam used to practice.. His leader, Kazim Haeri, wants a Khomeini-style Islamic republic in Iraq. The combination of Haeri’s authority and seniority with Muqtada’s cult of personality may prove powerful among the poor Shiites of Iraq.

*US Marines have induced Sayyid Abbas Fadil to vacate the mayor’s mansion in Kut. A member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), he had moved in to Kut and claimed to be its mayor, supported by an armed retinue of returning Iraqi expatriates from Iran. The first attempt of the Marines to move against him was blocked by an angry crowd of 1200. The Marines recently gave Sayyid Abbas an ultimatum. He has in the past said that he could as easily control the people of Kut from a mosque as from city hall, and would not be deterred by the Americans. So, the Marines won one, symbolically. But where will popular loyalties in Kut (a city of over 300,000) lie in the long run? Will the mob eventually reassemble against them? They have recently been fired on. In the nearby city of Baquba, pop. about 400,000, a SCIRI government has been installed; there are no Marines in the city. Badr Brigade militiamen patrol the streets. An earlier report said that there were also Faili Kurds among them.

*The Independent reported local Iraqi reaction to Donald Rumsfeld’s rejection of a Shiite theocracy in Iraq from the al-Muhsin Mosque in east Baghdad, where 13000 worshippers had gathered:

‘ “I thought the Americans said they wanted a democracy in Iraq,” said Kassem al-Sa’adi, a 41-year-old merchant. “If it is a democracy, why are they allowed to make the rules?” About 13,000 people gathered outside the mosque where the imam, Jabal al-Khafji called for an Islamic state in Iraq. The cleric’s view is widely shared by Iraq’s Shia majority which is clamouring for the occupying forces to be removed. ‘

*AP is reporting that at Friday Prayers in Nasiriya, a cleric giving the sermon to 2000 worshipers said, “We have to be ready in the long term to establish our own Islamic state.” The words were those of As`ad al-Nasiri, a prominent cleric who just returned from Syria. But like many Iraqi Shiites, he means by that a state governed by Islamic law rather than one ruled by clerics. He is said to have added, “We have to preserve this country by respecting the professionals and not interfere in their work.” But of course, if the professionals happen to be secularists who refuse to implement an Islamic state, that might provoke some interference from al-Nasiri and his like, now mightn’t it? The last I could tell, Nasiriya is dominated politically by the al-Da`wa Party, an old Shiite revolutionary party. The first thing he said should be taken very seriously.

*Abd al-`Aziz al-Hakim, second in command of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has reached Baghdad after winding his way through Shiite cities like Kut and Amara, being lionized in each. He came from Iran last week, where he had been in exile. He spoke to a large congregation at a mosque in east Baghdad, saying that SCIRI would not participate in any government “imposed” on Iraq, and that Iraqis are perfectly able to govern themselves. He also called for Iraqi unity. He said his brother, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, will come back to Iraq soon. SCIRI is likely to be a major player, but so far their leaders have refused to cooperate with the leadership meetings being called by Jay Garner, the American head of the office for reconstruction.

*Grand Ayatollah Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlu’llah of Lebanon gave an interview with Asharq al-Awsat in which he said that although the American war on Iraq had saved its people from a graven idol (i.e. Saddam), it aimed at reducing the country to a mere military base. He said that the demonstrations at Karbala were an “uprising” that could turn into anti-colonial resistance against US rule. Fadlu’llah is followed by some Iraqi Shiites, having been born and educated in Najaf. Although he has broken with the Hizbullah party (and with Iran), on these issues his stance is probably not far from that of Hizbullah.

*On the other hand, Shaikh `Abd al-Hadi al-Muhammadawi gave a sermon to the largest congregation in the Shiite part of Baghdad, in the al-Mansura district, in which he called for Iraqi independence from any “occupation” but at the same time called for a united Iraq and an end to violence and terrorism. He said it was natural for everyone to cooperate with the Americans for now, since they were the occupying power and had removed the stain of Saddam’s tyranny from Iraq. But he said that the US now has a responsiblity to follow through on its promises and to leave as soon as security and stability are restored to the country. He called for a dialogue of civilizations. This phrase comes from Iranian President Muhammad Khatami and shows that Khatami’s reformist and moderate principles have some followers among the clerics in Iraq. This sermon is the first evidence I have seen of influence from the Iranian reformers rather than from the hardliners (who seem to have a special line into SCIRI). This could get interesting. In the meantime, give that man a medal!