[Peace-discuss] Schell on Iraq.

[Morton K.Brussel]

A highly ambiguous and discouraging article, but tries to face the 
facts, some of which are disputable. mkb

   	
   	
Published on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
Iraq's Unpredictable Politics
by Jonathan Schell


This article will appear in the upcoming issue of The Nation Magazine.

Introspection is not the purpose of this occasional column, but a 
moment of it seems appropriate in the wake of the election recently 
held in Iraq. That election might have been a blood-soaked fiasco, 
aborted by insurgent forces. It might have been a nonevent, with sparse 
turnout and sullen voters. It might have been well attended but still 
inexpressive and mysterious, a merely formal exercise whose meaning was 
hard to interpret. But none of these eventualities -- which pretty much 
represented the range of my expectations -- transpired. Instead, the 
election was a full-throated, long-suppressed cry by millions of 
oppressed and abused people against tyranny, torture, terrorism, 
penury, anarchy and war, and an ardent appeal for freedom, peace, order 
and ordinary life.

I had not thought that, two years after Saddam Hussein's fall, such a 
powerful current of longing could well up. I did not believe that an 
election with 7,000 candidates, most of whose identities were secret, 
could inspire such enthusiasm. Above all, I did not believe that so 
many Iraqis, whose dislike of the American occupation is wide and deep, 
would seize an opportunity provided in part by that same occupation to 
express their desires with such clarity and force. On the contrary, I 
thought that national pride -- one of the most powerful forces of 
modern times -- would prevent it.

But express themselves the voters did, with compressed, elemental 
eloquence. What impressed was not turnout, which remains unknown, 
especially in Sunni areas; it was the demeanor and comments of those 
who did vote. A woman in Baghdad explained to the New York Times, "A 
hundred names on the ballot are better than one, because it means that 
we are free." Another woman in Baghdad said to the Washington Post, "We 
were sad for a long time and this is the first happiness we ever had." 
The election was a direct, powerfully expressed and articulated rebuke 
to car-bombers, kidnappers and beheaders. "Enough fear," a woman in 
Baghdad said. "Let us breathe the air of freedom." A man in Najaf whose 
father had been killed by Saddam's regime said, "My father helped bring 
this election today." People brought their children. A man accompanied 
by his son said, "I expect he will be voting many times." Another man 
said, "How much those terrorists hate the Iraqis. They were trying to 
kill us just because we want to do the thing we like to do." Many 
voters spoke with deep emotion. A man told the Los Angeles Times, "I 
kissed the ballot box." Another said to the New York Times, "People 
have been thirsting for these elections, as if it was a wedding."

There was, I confess, a momentary temptation for someone like me, who 
has opposed the war from the start and believed it would lead to 
nothing good, simply to scant the importance of the event, or react to 
it defensively, or speed past it on the way back to an uneasy 
confirmation of previous views. But the impulse passed. After all, 
hadn't I been irked that the war's promoters, including the President, 
had refused to admit a mistake when they had not found weapons of mass 
destruction in Iraq, when they had failed to foresee the insurgency 
that soon broke out after Baghdad was taken, when American forces, 
encouraged by memos penned at the top levels of the Administration, had 
committed widespread acts of torture? More important, when masses of 
ordinary people act with courage to express deep and positive longings, 
shouldn't one give them their due? But most important of all, wasn't 
full acknowledgment of the magnitude of the event necessary for any 
real understanding of what might happen next in Iraq?

The first question for me, therefore, has to be how a decidedly popular 
election occurred under the auspices of a decidedly unpopular 
occupation. That unpopularity cannot be doubted. It was manifested in 
opinion polls (for instance, in May a poll taken by the Coalition 
Provisional Authority found that 92 percent of Iraqis saw American 
forces as "occupiers" and only 2 percent saw them as "liberators"), but 
also in the statements of most Iraqi leaders not actually participating 
in the interim government approved by the occupation. The most 
significant of them were leaders of the Shiite Muslims, who make up 
almost two-thirds of the population in Iraq and who came to be 
represented in the election mainly by the party called the United Iraqi 
Alliance (UIA). Before the vote, the Shiite leadership's position had 
been clear: It demanded the withdrawal of American forces after the 
election. Yet as Trudy Rubin has reported in the Gulf Times, the UIA 
has dropped its demand for a speedy, timed withdrawal, now asking only 
for "an Iraq which is capable of guaranteeing its security and borders 
without depending on foreign troops." Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim 
al-Jaafari, an alliance member, told Rubin, "If the United States pulls 
out too fast, there would be chaos."

The story of this reversal perhaps began in January 2004, when the 
spiritual leader of the Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 
announced his opposition to an indecipherably complex American plan to 
hold eighteen regional caucuses, which would then choose a national 
assembly. Sistani demanded direct elections for the assembly instead. 
He may or may not have been a true believer in democracy, but he 
certainly understood that in any democratic vote Shiites would win 
power, reversing several centuries of rule by the Sunni Muslims, who 
make up only about 20 percent of Iraq's population.

The Bush Administration balked. Sistani insisted. He made a show of 
strength by summoning hundreds of thousands of Shiites to 
demonstrations in Basra and Baghdad in support of his plan. He called 
for an end to the occupation as soon as the vote was held. The 
demonstrators in Basra chanted, "No, no to conspiracies. No, no to 
occupation," and "No to America, no to Saddam, no to colonialism." The 
Bush Administration, afraid of further estranging two-thirds of the 
population of Iraq, acquiesced.

Having brought the Administration to heel, Sistani next faced a 
challenge from within Shiite ranks. In spring 2004, the radical cleric 
Muqtada al-Sadr launched an armed insurrection against the occupation. 
Sistani stood by while American forces badly bloodied Sadr's forces in 
several weeks of fighting in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, and then he 
successfully summoned both sides to join in a truce in which the forces 
of both were withdrawn from the city. He granted a meeting to Sadr, who 
offered a guarded fealty. At the same time, Sistani expressed a sort of 
vague acceptance of Sadr's enemy, the US- and UN-appointed interim 
government.

Still another potential challenge to Sistani's plan was the largely 
Sunni insurgency, heavily concentrated in the city of Falluja. When, 
after a long delay, American forces attacked Falluja, Sistani again 
stood aside; but this time, he made no offer to broker a truce or 
mutual troop withdrawals. Falluja was bombed, emptied of most of its 
people, invaded and occupied.

Sistani's stance toward the occupation had now become at least 
implicitly equivocal. Having defied the United States in the matter of 
the election, he had twice stood by while American forces battered 
internal enemies--first Sadr, then the Sunni Fallujan rebels. Even as 
he was offering the elections as a means of ending the occupation, he 
was relying on the occupation to make the elections happen.

Then yet another danger to the election took shape, this time in the 
form of bloody attacks largely by Sunni insurgents upon Shiites 
specifically, including one of Sistani's aides. Sistani acted once 
again to defend his plan -- this time imposing a remarkable and 
impressive restraint on his followers, who did not retaliate. Had they 
done so, he certainly knew, the country might have descended into civil 
war, and the elections would have been ruined. The Sunnis could still 
boycott the voting, and the great majority of them reportedly did, but 
they failed to stop it entirely.

In sum, the election on January 30 -- conceived by Sistani, forced upon 
a reluctant Bush Administration by Sistani, and defended by Sistani (in 
concert with American forces) against both Shiite and Sunni 
insurrections -- was first and foremost a kind of Shiite uprising. It 
was an astonishingly successful revolt against subjugation and 
repression that Shiites have suffered in Iraq at the hands of 
foreigners and domestic minorities alike. That this uprising took the 
form of a peaceful election rather than a bloody rebellion is owing to 
the shrewdness, and possibly the wisdom, of Sistani.

The results of the election, though incomplete at this writing, confirm 
that it was above all a Shiite event. As expected, Shiite and Kurdish 
turnout was reportedly high, Sunni turnout low. The joy the world 
witnessed at the polling places was mostly Shiite joy. (If Kurds were 
less effusive, it was because they had long been the de facto masters 
of their territory.)

What the election was not was a decision by "the Iraqi people." It's 
not even clear that at this moment there is such a thing as the Iraqi 
people. Opinion among scholars and others is divided on the point. Iraq 
is a nation without a constitution (it is governed by a Transitional 
Administrative Law) and without a state. If some observers are correct, 
it is also a nation without a nation. Its three major groups -- the 
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds --lack the common ties, these scholars say, 
required for nationhood and have merely been forced to live in a single 
polity, first by the British and then by Saddam. (It's notable that 
Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, took 
the occasion of the election to comment that he hopes to see an 
independent Kurdistan in his lifetime.) Other observers argue that 
genuine national feeling still can unite the groups.

It's significant -- and discouraging -- that Sistani's first act after 
the election was to signal through aides that all Iraqi law should be 
founded in Islamic law. For all his tactical sagacity, he may turn out 
to belong to the long list of leaders able to win power but unable to 
found a just new order. All the parties express a desire to avoid civil 
war, but there is a distinct possibility that what the vote 
strengthened was not "the Iraqi people" but each of the subgroups. The 
high vote of the Shiites and the low vote of the Sunnis may have 
carried the same message: When all is said and done, we are more 
faithful to the interest of our own group than to a unified Iraq. The 
very steps Sistani took to achieve the Shiite electoral triumph may 
turn out to have fatally undermined any future government. When he 
acquiesced in the smashing of Falluja, he passed up an opportunity for 
national solidarity that may not come soon again. The danger for the 
Shiite leadership is that by associating themselves with an occupying 
power, they will -- even among many Shiites -- throw away the 
legitimacy that the election has just given them. Then all hopes, 
including those so movingly expressed on January 30, will have been 
betrayed.

It's in this radically unpredictable and rapidly developing context 
that the question of the future of the American occupation must be 
considered. There can be no doubt that the election was a rebellion by 
the Shiites against their traditional oppressors in Iraq. Was it also a 
rebellion against the occupation? For all the eloquence of the voters 
at the polls, they gave little clue on this point. In the coverage I 
saw, there was much gratitude for voting but little or no love for 
Americans. The scene of the Iraqi woman kissing the mother of the slain 
American soldier occurred in Washington at the State of the Union 
address, not in Iraq. Some voters said that their vote had been against 
the occupation as well as past tyranny, but they also were few.

Since the invasion, Americans have been absorbed in the debate over 
whether U.S. troops should remain in Iraq ("stay the course") or leave. 
The issue of the moment is whether the commitment should be open-ended 
or, as I believe, limited by a deadline for withdrawal. The danger for 
the United States in staying is that it will wind up on one side of a 
civil war that its presence will continually exacerbate but be unable 
to quell. This American debate is crucial, but now a prior question 
pushes to the fore. Will the new leadership of Iraq invite American 
troops to stay or ask them to leave?

The rudiments of a new governing authority in Iraq have appeared for 
the first time since the war that felled Saddam. It's unknowable 
whether such an authority can surmount the sectarian divisions it faces 
-- in effect, creating an Iraqi nation -- or, if it does succeed, 
whether it will invite American forces to remain. What we can know is 
that from now on it is Iraqis, not Americans, who will be making the 
most fundamental decisions in their country.

Jonathan Schell is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. 
The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.