On 9/3/06, Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Juan Cole:
http://www.juancole.com/2006/09/south-asian-pilgrims-slaughtered.html
opednews.com, Ron Fullwood, reads about the same way:
<...>
The Independent is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has
"abandoned attempts to restrain his followers" and no longer believes he
can stand in the way of the growing civil war. "I will not be a
political leader any more," he reportedly told aides. "I am only happy
to receive questions about religious matters."
Sistani's departure from Iraq's political scene and his return to his
religious role signals an end to the Maliki regime's attempt to
consolidate power and sell his reconciliation plan to the myriad of
warring factions who are engaged in armed and deadly struggles against
his regime, and against each other as well. It was Sistani who brought
the thousands of his followers to the polls, forcing Bush to make good
on his promise of early elections.
It was Sistani who forged an alliance with former militant, Shiite
cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr allowing the elections to proceed. It's no
exaggeration that, without Sistani's participation there may never have
been elections in Iraq, or a Maliki government.
It's also clear that, without Sistani's involvement in Iraq's political
future, Sadr's political influence will be elevated in the short term.
It remains to be seen, though, if Sadr, who is arguably more prone to
lead his followers to armed and active resistance, and, whose followers
are already engaging government troops in street battles, will follow
Sistani and lead his congregation away from the political sweet spot
he's carved out for himself in the Iraqi legislature.
One thing that's certain, however, is that Iraq is indeed poised for a
complete breakdown along sectarian lines, whatever you want to call it,
and a devolution into a full-scale battle for each faction's political
and material survival. In an ominous sign of things to come, the Kurds
have replaced the Iraqi flag they were flying with one of their own.
Iraq is splitting apart.
<...>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_060903_sistani_led_his_foll.htm
IMHO, Sistani's support for the 2005 elections in Iraq, run on the
basis of sectarian parties vying for seats and spoils, contributed to
the rise of sectarian violence.
Daily Attacks by Insurgents:
May 2003 5
May 2004 53
May 2005 70
May 2006 90
Monthly Incidents of Sectarian Violence:
May 2003 5
May 2004 10
May 2005 20
May 2006 250
SOURCE: Nina Kamp, Michael O'Hanlon, and Amy Unikewicz, "The State of
Iraq: An Update," New York Times, 16 June 2006
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/StateofIraq16Jun06.gif>
Note the more than tenfold increase in sectarian violence since the elections.
The Iraqi people need a national liberation front, rather than
sectarian parties. A national liberation front has to include those
Sunni and Shi'is who have taken up arms, but it cannot solely consist
of fighters; it has to be the kind of front in which women can
participate, the kind of front that can wage mass struggles (largely)
without arms, in the fashion that the Iranians forced out the Shah (in
which armed struggles had very little -- virtually no -- role).
If a national liberation front of this sort comes about at all (it
won't be easy to create one, especially if you want the Kurds in), it
will do so in large part due to Moktada al-Sadr's initiative,* for he
has a genuine popular base among the Shi'i working class, alone among
the Shi'is leaders of Iraq, and he is not Persian (unlike Sistani, who
is Iranian-born and is said to speak with a Persian accent), a big
bonus point, and yet knows how to make friends with Tehran. Sadr has
to sell Tehran on his idea, so Tehran will either drop SCIRI and Badr
or compel them to sign on to it (the former is better than the
latter); or better yet, Sadr will get more popular among Shi'is and
relegate SCIRI and Badr to irrelevance.
* <blockquote>As part of his effort to influence the political forces
in Iraq prior to the forthcoming parliamentary election, at the end of
November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters distribute the draft of a
"Pact of Honor," and called on Iraqi parties to discuss and
collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before the
election.
This conference was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in
al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad). Despite extensive search, I found it
only reported in a relatively short article in today's Al-Hayat and in
dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is
legitimate ground to suspect that this media blackout has political
significance; indeed most initiatives by the Sadrist current are
hardly reported by the dominant media, even when they consist of
important mass demonstrations (like those organized yesterday in
Southern Iraq against British troops).
In the case of the recent conference, the vast array of forces that
were represented and that signed the "Pact of Honor" is in itself
already worthy of attention. Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly
represented by their MPs, those represented and who signed the
document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari's personal
representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his
traveling outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major
Sunni electoral alliance in the forthcoming election), to name but the
most prominent of a long list of organizations, along with several
tribal chiefs, unions and other social associations, members of the
De-Ba'athification Committee and a few government officials. Ahmad
Chalabi -- who definitely deserves to be called "The Transformer" --
attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group.
It seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as
its name is not mentioned in any of the two sources.
According to the reports, the "Pact of Honor" that was adopted
consists of 14 points, among which the following demands and
agreements are the most important (the sentences in quotation marks
are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):
· "withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable
for their withdrawal from Iraq"; "elimination of all the consequences
of their presence, including any bases for them in the country, while
working seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security institutions
and military forces within a defined schedule";
· suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand
coming with the condemnation of their practices against civilians and
their breach of human rights;
· categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;
· "resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism
does not represent legitimate resistance"; "we condemn terrorism and
acts of violence, killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent
citizens for sectarian reasons";
· "to activate the de-Ba'athification law and to consider that the
Ba'ath party is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it
brought on the oppressed sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of
overthrown president Saddam Hussein and the pillars of his regime";
· "to postpone the implementation of the disputed principle of
federalism and to respect the people's opinion about it."
The conference established a committee that is responsible for
following up the implementation of the resolutions and reporting on it
after six months.
If anything, the conference was a testimony to the increasing
importance of the Sadrist current. As for the actual implementation of
its resolutions, it will greatly depend on the pressure that the same
current will be able to exert after the forthcoming election, if the
United Iraqi Alliance -- of which the Sadrists are a major pillar on a
par with SCIRI -- succeeds in getting a commanding position in the
next National Assembly. (Gilbert Achcar, "A Pan-Iraqi Pact on Muqtada
Al-Sadr's Initiative," December 9, 2005,
r<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9297></blockquote>
The pact is not good enough -- emphasis on de-Ba'athification law
severely limits the pact's relevance for Sunnis -- but if Sadr learns
to overcome his sectarianism concerning Ba'athists (since many joined
the party for jobs or under duress), he can get to play the role that
Nasrallah does in Lebanon.
Here's another interesting note on the struggle between Sadr and SCIRI:
<blockquote>The other major contest took place within the UIA itself,
pitting against one another the two major blocs: the SCIRI and the
followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. The SCIRI wanted the premiership for
their own man, Adel Abdel- Mahdi, an ex-Maoist turned fundamentalist
in both Islamic and neoliberal religions. Despite the fact that the
SCIRI is the closest of all Iraqi groups to Iran and despite its
advocacy of a super-federal state in southern Iraq, an idea that is
resented by the United States (and rejected by all other Arab Iraqi
forces, including Muqtada al-Sadr's followers), Washington backed
Abdel-Mahdi, hoping that he would help the United States lay its hands
on Iraq's oil in the name of free marketeering. Khalilzad, chiefly
obsessed with reducing Muqtada al-Sadr's clout, was also trying in
this way to fan the dissension within the UIA. For his part, Sadr
strongly backed his friend and leader of the Dawa Party, Jaafari, whom
he deemed closer to his political stance (Jaafari had subscribed
without reservation to the "Pact of Honor" that Sadr tried to get all
major Iraqi forces independent of Washington to sign [1]) and more
open to his pressure.
Tension might have arisen between the two factions, but Tehran --
which invited Muqtada al-Sadr for a visit after the December election
-- was certainly instrumental in preventing the UIA from splitting and
urging the SCIRI to consider the UIA's unity as a priority. The issue
of the UIA's candidate for premiership was thus decided democratically
by a vote within the alliance, which gave a narrow majority to
Jaafari. Washington's "democracy promoters" did their best thereafter
to prevent the constitutional mechanism from getting under way:
Normally, the Assembly would have convened and elected among others a
president who would have been required to designate the candidate put
forward by the largest bloc in parliament -- Jaafari, in this case --
to try to form a government. This position would have enabled Jaafari
to maneuver between the other blocs and try to win over enough Arab
Sunni representatives to secure a parliamentary majority, thus forcing
the Kurdish Alliance to join lest they be excluded from the
government.
Obviously, such a scenario was out of the question for Washington: The
result was a very tense and highly dangerous standoff, until a
compromise was reached whereby Jaafari agreed to be replaced with his
second-in-command in the Dawa Party, Nouri al-Maliki. The latter was
presented as being less sympathetic to Iran and more flexible and
amenable than Jaafari. As a matter of fact, Maliki seems more
compliant than Jaafari in his relations with the United States.
("Epilogue," Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power: The
Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, edited with a Preface by Stephen
R. Shalom, Paradigm Publishers, 2006,
<http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/achcar-guest-editorial-situation-in.html>)</blockquote>
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
