The Washington Post Give the Shiites a Say By Jim Hoagland Friday, January 23, 2004
Iraq's Shiite majority has begun to pry political control of the country from U.S. administrator Paul Bremer and his small, overwhelmed staff in Baghdad. The Bush administration should welcome and help shape this silent transition rather than fight to retain eroding power. That power will in any event be exhausted by June 30, the date on which the United States has agreed to return sovereignty to Iraq. That deadline is the one immovable object in a tangled web of U.S.-U.N.-Iraqi negotiations over ending an occupation that has essentially run its erratic course. Other details can and will be fudged. Bremer's once unshakable insistence on control over tiny details of occupation is being sapped by a nascent internal Iraqi political process, which triggered high-level meetings on Iraq's future in New York and Washington this week. The approach of the normally assertive U.S. administrator for Iraq ranged from reactive to passive at the United Nations and in the White House sessions, other participants report. Acting in concert more often than the Bush administration seems to realize, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and leading Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council agree on one overriding objective: The Shiite majority must not be cheated out of political control of Iraq or once again be subjugated by a domineering minority. Those fears haunt the Shiites nine months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-based regime. President Bush came face to face with the force of this fear on Tuesday at the White House, where a brief encounter may have done more to inform Bush's view of Iraq than dozens of lengthy briefing books or position papers. During Bush's spirited meeting with an ethnically and religiously balanced delegation from the Governing Council, Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim suddenly and gravely asked to speak privately with the president, according to several at the meeting. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials visibly tensed and tried to bypass the request. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, intervened to get Hakim and his interpreter five valuable minutes with the president. Rice sensed that Hakim had something important to say. We need your protection. Don't abandon us. That was the thrust of Hakim's direct and personal appeal to Bush, according to a reconstruction of the conversation provided by a U.S. source. The ayatollah's remarks clearly applied to Iraq's Shiites, who are thought to make up 60 percent of Iraq's 24 million people. "The Shiites still fear that the Sunnis have their number," says a mid-level U.S. official who has worked closely with both groups in Iraq in recent months. "Their fears may seem irrational to us, but those fears drive what Sistani and the others are doing. They remember when the United States stood by and let them be slaughtered" during their 1991 revolt. The murderous insurgency in the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad and suicide bombings by terrorists elsewhere in Iraq have deepened Shiite fears that many Sunnis will fight majority rule as they have fought U.S. occupation. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi branch of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, left the Governing Council delegation in New York rather than come to Washington and be photographed visiting the White House. Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has joined Ibrahim Jafari and other leaders of Shiite Islamic parties and Ahmed Chalabi, a practicing Shiite who heads the secular Iraqi National Congress, to create an informal caucus of Governing Council members. The Shiite caucus has held two important strategy sessions with Sistani at his base in Najaf since the ayatollah raised objections to the Nov. 15 U.S. proposal for indirect elections, according to Iraqi sources. Sistani, the most respected Shiite cleric in the country, refuses to meet directly with Bremer and is not well known by the Sunni members of the Governing Council. Sistani and the Shiite politicians agree that democratic elections, conducted while U.S.-led coalition forces still provide security, should guarantee the Shiites political dominance. A U.N. statement fixing a date for direct elections later this year or in early 2005 would provide Sistani with political cover for accepting a short delay in majority rule. Neither his objections nor the recent Shiite street demonstrations should be seen in Washington as menacing developments. "We have to remind ourselves sometimes that politics in Iraq is a good thing," says one Bush aide, who reported that the president successfully reassured Hakim and the other Governing Council members that he would press for democratic elections as soon as possible. American leadership on that agenda, rather than grudging acceptance of inevitable change, is the right course. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
