A few days ago I wrote about the borderlands between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. Today I'd like to write about Iraq's Shia' majority. Shia' politics is the politics of raw emotion: despair, fear, anger and hope. An friend of mine has a video stored on his cell phone of Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who was an important Shia' political leader until a car bomb went off and blasted him into vapor. Let's turn on my friend's phone and have a closer look at the holy cities and the urban slums of Shia' Iraq:
A tiny image of al-Hakim appears on the screen. He is preaching at the grand mosque in Najaf and rhythmically repeating a phrase as he rocks back and forth. The crowd is roaring in unison. He raises his hands and begins to weep at the tragedy of Imam Hussein's murder. He removes his turban, and begins to beat himself on his head...
Politics of Despair:
More than 13 centuries ago, Islam split over a dispute regarding the succession to the Prophet Mohammed. An army sent by the Caliph killed Mohammed's grandson Ali and his defender Hussein. Ali is buried in Najaf, which is the center of the Shia' religious hierarchy. Hussein is buried in Karbala. The unjust deaths of these two men have deep spiritual and political meaning for the Shia'. A week ago, Iraq `celebrated' Ashura, the national holiday commemorating the death of Imam Hussein. Pilgrims in Karbala beat their backs with whips or cut themselves with swords in grief. I heard John Stewart showed some of the images on the Daily Show, but Ashura is a serious matter here in Iraq:
(I had intended to post an image but all I have is a jpeg and no host website. So I'll describe it: Three men and two boys in an Ashura procession face the camera, soaked in blood from superficial head wounds. One boy, about age 12, holds a bloody sword.)
The images seems as irrational and frightening to us as the Spanish Inquisition. Ashura was banned under Saddam but it is back stronger than ever, with a distinct political meaning: The Shia' of Iraq will not be subservient again. An Islamist government led by Shia' political parties is inevitabile. That frightens us - hell, it frightens me. What kind of a fanatic gives a knife to a kid and asks him to cut himself? Why is the United States so focused on fighting a Sunni insurgency when crazed Iranian-backed fundamentalists are taking over Iraq?
Of course, things are more complicated than that. Perhaps we Democrats can empathize with the Shia' as we learn what it's like to live under an illegitimate successor to power. Give us a thousand more years of Republican rule and we'll probably be cutting ourselves with swords, too. The Shia' identity was founded in despair magnified over centuries. They've been an underclass for so long that an elaborate religious hierarchy arose to either supplant political power or function in direct opposition to temporal leaders. This religious hierarchy held the Shia' together for centuries and led them through the long night under Saddam.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is the most revered and influential of all the living Shia clergy. I was unable to get near to Sistani's house on my one trip to Najaf because the area is blocked off with armed militia who tightly restrict access. He lives austerely in a small cluster of rooms hidden in a dense mass of old buildings near the Grand Mosque in Najaf. He rarely leaves home, and only agreed last summer to accept an air conditioner in a city where temperatures in summer can exceed 115 degrees. The mosque is glorious, but the neighborhood is chaotic mix of adobe brick and concrete buildings, festooned with electrical wires and satellite dishes. Najaf is not a beautiful city, except for the austere beauty of the huge cities of the dead where devout Shia' have come to be buried for centuries. I stood near a water-filled ditch in the evening and looked back toward the city beyond the cemeteries. The sound of toads in an orgiastic frenzy was a fine counterpoint to the call to prayer.
Elevation in the Shia' religious hierarchy is based on accumulation of followers who recognize an individual's wisdom and skill in interpreting religious law. In that sense, it's somewhat democratic, at least if you restrict the field to the community of male believers. When governments lack legitimacy, people go to religious authorities for guidance on spiritual and practical matters. Given the total lack of government legitimacy in Iraq for decades, the word of a man like Sistani has huge political impact. Even though he is neither a politician nor an Iraqi, Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the most powerful man in Iraq.
Want to get a better sense of what Sistani thinks? Check out the English language page on his website: http://www.sistani.org/... (The Q & A section is very funny, but please be respectful and do not post frivolous or insulting questions.)
Sistani represents the old Najafi establishment of religious leaders skilled in mediating the relationship between their people and political authority, often conveyed through seminary students who function like Supreme Court clerks. (These are the guys who respond to Q&A.) The clergy have to walk a fine line between responding to injustice and acting pragmatically to prevent additional injury to their community. This is not an easy thing to do. Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Sadr miscalculated and Saddam's men killed him by pounding a nail into his head. Sistani survived and now he has prevented a civil war by calling on his people not to respond violently to the suicide bombings, massacres and other barbarous acts carried out by Sunni insurgents. Suffering can lead to empathy for others, and this is the positive side of the Shia' legacy of despair. Note the irony: A hermit ayatollah with a 14th century worldview calls for tolerance and restraint in the face of unspeakable acts of terrorism. Our Commander in Chief spares no effort to frighten us with threats that any Iraqi would regard as trivial, and uses this fear to shred our Constitution.
Politics of Fear:
Like American politics, Shia' politics are also driven by fear. Iraqis function with threats we would find unbearable, and the Shia' in particular fear the insurgency and the desire of the Arab nations to see a return of Sunni power in Iraq. This fear breeds a deep insecurity about the future and forces older, more traditional Shia' parties like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa' to look for external support. Ironically, the Shia' find themselves in the position of depending on two of the least trusted nations on earth, according to a recent poll: Iran and the United States. The perceived need to maintain relations with both is why every single Iraqi I know prays that the US does not attack Iran. If there is simply no other choice, the Shia' traditional leadership certainly have a greater affinity with Iran and will dump the United States. But they fear Iran too, and their common Shia' heritage is not sufficient in itself to inspire trust with a government that, like the United States, is merciless in pursuit of its own economic interests, has a mixed record supporting Iraqi refugees and oppresses its own Arab minority. The desire not to be left in a vacuum where one internal or external power can control them is the paradoxical reason why the Shia' political party most closely associated with Iran - SCIRI - has held off calling for the immediate withdrawal of US forces, even though a majority of their followers want the US out now. The US needs to take a gentle approach, remove all forces from Shia' dominated parts of the country, and avoid any action that would further antagonize the Shia' community.
Is that our policy?
No. It's no wonder that recent clumsy US efforts to strong-arm the Shia' to cede control of either the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defense to the Sunnis backfired so badly. When the Shia' parties refused to back down, the US enacted major cutbacks in humanitarian assistance and made who-knows-what other unspecified threats if the Shia' do not put either the military or the police under Sunni command. Our heavy-handed actions made SCIRI look incompetent, strengthened Muqtada al-Sadr (again) and quite likely threw the prime minister's election from Adel al-Mahdi, who in my opinion is the more reasonable man, back to Ibrahim Jaafari, a weak consensus candidate backed by Sadr who will neither control human rights abuses nor effectively prosecute the war against the insurgents. Meanwhile Sadr waits in the background, benefiting from US mistakes and from the chaos in the traditional Shia' political organizations as they attempt to satisfy their constituents, the United States and Iran at the same time. (My take on Sadr is bleak, but more on that later.)
I know most on DailyKos accept the point of view that the Sunni community in Iraq needs a co-equal or at least prominent place in government. Perhaps the US request was not so unreasonable, after all. I think that there's no question that will be true in the future. But imagine for a moment that after generations of Republican rule, and the extra-judicial execution of about two million Democrats, we were suddenly commanded by some outside power to appoint a Republican Secretary of Defense or Attorney General. Can you imagine the howls of protest here on DailyKos? Lieberman would probably cave and Armando would get 60,000 4's for demanding his head on a pike.
The traditional Shia' political parties feel the same way. They are fighting an insurgency with an uncertain outcome, and while they might listen to a recommendation regarding the Ministry of Health, they don't appreciate the US telling them who runs the ministries that spawn coups. The more level-headed of the Shia' leaders are reluctant for the US to go because they know they are not ready to try to police al-Anbar or even Baghdad, but they are reluctant for the US to stay because US blunders make the insurgency worse and alienate their base. They must respond to the insurgent threat quickly or lose their support and possibly their lives. When fear of losing everything drives decisions, the risk of violence increases - which in part explains the brutality of the Shia' Badr Brigades. Negroponte's little training exercise didn't help matters, and we need to make sure he and Rumsfeld are criminally charged even if it takes years. However, the Shia' militias were already competent at using torture against their opponents. They learned as victims in Saddam's jails. As long as the outcome of the insurgency is unclear, they will inflict upon the Sunni community the same terror they experienced.
The organization I work with also operates in southern Iraq. All of the Shia' employees and government officials I have spoken to about politics harbor fear or at least distrust of Iran. We have no political litmus test for our employees, and they can pretty much hold whatever opinions they want as long as one of them isn't "ivorybill must die". Staff members are more or less divided between SCIRI and Sadr with a few Dawa' and Virtue party followers thrown in. They know I'm no fan of Bush, and I believe that they are relatively open with me in discussions about the state of their country. I'm conversant in Arabic and most of them speak English anyway, so we speak directly. I wanted to profile a few of them briefly, because it is a shame that Americans don't get to know more Iraqis on a personal basis.
Ali works in our program despite the fact he hates America. As is usually the case, this hatred is more abstract than personal - Ali likes me because I don't drink or otherwise conform to his stereotypes about Americans. I don't like the term "fundamentalist" but there's really no other way to describe him. During a conference in a neighboring country, Ali felt compelled to sing his prayers from the hotel roof at night. His colleagues forced him to come down because they knew any meeting between a chanting, bearded Iraqi and the host country's humorless security police was bound to end badly. Ali follows Muqtada al-Sadr because of his anti-American stand and because he thinks Sadr is tough enough to crush the insurgents. He hates Iran almost as much as America.
Kadhim represents the urban educated moderate type. He is a reluctant backer of Dawa', although he is exasperated with Prime Minister Jaafari's inability to control the insurgency without outside help. He has a complicated love-hate relationship with the US and despite his intelligence and education, believes the sort of conspiracy theories that even the most extreme tinfoil-hat types in our community would be too embarrassed to post. He suspects the US is actually supporting the Sunni insurgency in order to keep the Shia' in submission, for example. He would like to see an internal revolution in Iran bring the moderates back to power, and he wants the moderates back in power in the US, too.
Salah is probably the most representative of our staff. He is a quiet, devout and introspective man who was forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq war, was tortured under Saddam, spent years in Iran after the 1991 uprising and remembers how Revolutionary Guards intimidated and mistreated Iraqi refugees in the camps. He has a strong distrust of the Iranian government, but likes both Iranians and Americans on a personal level. Like many Shia' from outside Baghdad, he is more disappointed than angry with the Americans. He is grateful that Saddam is gone, but he wants the occupation to end. He is a strong backer of SCIRI, the party with the closest ties to Iran. He is tired of war, but does not see a negotiated end to the fighting yet and feels that the insurgency must be confronted more aggressively.
I suspect the theory that the Shia' parties are in lockstep with Iran is as simplistic as the theory that the Kurds are mere American stooges. The end result may be the same - the Shia' parties may be driven into Iran's arms, and the Kurds may yet suffer for their heartbreaking trust in the United States. Still, it seems to me that the traditionalist Shia' parties' deliberate policy of courting both US and Iranian support indicates that they fear their enemies within more than their enemies abroad. As the entire Bush presidency has shown us, fear is generally a bad emotion upon which to base sound policy.
Sometimes power goes instead to those who are angry. I'd like to discuss anger as an emotion driving Shia' politics and also make some recommendations regarding US policy, but this diary is already way too long. I'll split it into two, and post the second part about the same time tomorrow, Insh'allah. True to my annoying Pollyanna nature, I'll also have a word or two to say about hope.
On my friend's cell phone screen, tiny onlookers rush to the stage and restrain the ayatollah from hurting himself. The distorted roar of the crowd fades and the screen goes blank. My friend closes his cell phone, and puts it in his pocket. Part one of this diary is over.
POSTSCRIPT: Although I am writing this from Iraq, I'm not in the part of the country discussed in this diary. It's a fair question to ask whether my perspective has any more validity than someone writing from New York. We employ staff in two southern cities and in Baghdad, and I meet with them frequently. I don't want to be specific about our work except to say that it is humanitarian in nature. Although I have spent time in Karbala, Najaf, Basra and Baghdad since the invasion, my travel in southern Iraq is constrained at the moment because I will not employ a "personal security detail" i.e. Blackwater-style protection. (I'm with Kos 100% on his take on mercenaries.)