In Najaf, the holy Shi'ite city, the grand ayatollahs are busy advancing a religious agenda: Ali al-Sistani, Mohammad Ishaq al-Fayad, Bashir al-Najafi and Mohammad Said Hakim
compose the al-marja' iyyah (source of infallible authority on all religious matters). They are unanimous: the Shi'ite religious parties, the big winners in the elections,
must implement Sharia (Islamic) law - and in fact this is one of the parties' top priorities. This does not
mean that Sistani wants - or needs - to control an Iraqi theocracy: it means that the Shi'ite religious parties themselves - led by secular people - will give birth to an Iraqi Islamic republic.
Sistani's
representatives have been stressing in the past few days that what matters for the grand ayatollah is equal rights for all. According to his senior aide, Mohammad al-Haboubi, the top priority in the writing of the future
Iraqi constitution is "the preservation of the rights of all citizens, majority or minority, so they are all equal in the eyes of the law".
Most Shi'ite scholars insist the Americans must stay away from
the writing of the new constitution. Whether the Americans like it or not, Sharia law will prevail over civil law. What's left is a matter of degree: how deep will Sharia in Iraq rule over everything - apart from stating
that women may not shake hands with men, music is allowed only "if it is not for enjoyment" and daughters inherit less than sons?
Sistani will have the last word as far as who will be the new Iraqi prime
minister, not to mention the turbulent process of drafting the permanent constitution. He will refuse to allow the Kurds a veto power over the constitution - something they already have thanks to an administrative law
passed by the Americans.
Baghdad
sources confirm that a key reason for Sistani to "bless" the Shi'ite-dominated United Iraqi
Alliance
(UIA) was that he was assured a primordial role in drafting the constitution. Moreover, Sistani himself is infinitely more popular and respected than the two main Shi'ite parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in
Iraq
(SCIRI) and the Da'wa Party. For the majority of Sunnis and even for some secular Shi'ites, they are Iranian agents: during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the SCIRI was on
Iran
's side, ie against Saddam. Without Sistani's "blessing", these parties would never have been voted for en masse on January 30.
What about all that oil?
Abdel Mahdi, currently the finance minister and a member of the SCIRI, remains a strong contender for prime minister, alongside Ibrahim al-Jafaari of Da'wa.
On
December 22, Mahdi - with US Under Secretary of State Alan Larson by his side - told the National Press Club in
Washington
in so many words, and to the delight of corporate
US
oil majors, that a new oil law would privatize
Iraq
's oil industry. The new law would allow investment in both downstream and "maybe even upstream" operations, meaning foreigners could become de facto owners of Iraqi oilfields. No wonder Mahdi has been touted
by US corporate media as the next best candidate for prime minister after "the Americans' man", former Central Intelligence Agency (
CIA
) asset and current Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Apart from an item by Inter Press Service at the time, Antonia Juhasz, a Foreign Policy in Focus scholar currently writing a book about the economic invasion of
Iraq, has been the only one to sound alarm bells: Is it possible that Washington has made a deal - oil for power - with the SCIRI?
This is the fine print that President George W Bush's freedom rhetoric does not
cover.
Iraq
may have a new "elected" National Assembly and a new Iraqi constitution may be written in the next few months. But the fact is that during 2005 the
US
remains in total control. Follow the money: US$24 billion funded by American taxpayers toward the reconstruction, plus all the rules that have been passed by the
US
that control
Iraq
's economy, plus the military occupation.
Both the billions of dollars and the maze of rules are controlled by auditors sitting in every Iraqi ministry for five years, all of them appointed (and controlled) by the
Americans. The only thing that the Bush administration does not control in
Iraq
is unlimited, no-holds-barred access to oil - which anyone familiar with Vice President Dick Cheney's world view knows to be the key reason for the invasion and occupation of
Iraq
.
The whole point of an indefinite, muscular
US
military presence in
Iraq
(14 military bases, more than 100,000 troops, the massive embassy in
Baghdad
, the
CIA
-trained "
Salvador
option" death squads) would be to protect US corporate interests in the oil industry. But the possibility of a law privatizing
Iraq
's oil coming to pass under a UIA-dominated government is less than zero - for two main reasons. In terms of Iraqi nationalism, this would spell political suicide to either the SCIRI or the Da'wa Party: most Shi'ites who
voted in the elections, following Sistani's dictum, thought they were voting for the
US
to leave, for good. And in geopolitical terms, all the Shi'ite religious parties have close connections with
Iran
, which, encircled by the
US
from the east (
Afghanistan
) and west (
Iraq
), would find innumerable creative ways to turn the Americans' lives into a living hell.
One of the key - if not the key - challenges for the new Iraqi government will be a
US
demand to negotiate a SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), the agreement that stipulates the legal status of US garrisons. A cursory look at a world map will teach Iraqis to be extremely careful not to fall into a
trap. There are insistent rumors in
Baghdad
that a SOFA will not be negotiated in 2005: the responsibility will fall to the permanent government that will be elected next December. This is one more indication of the irrelevance of the new elected government.
The Pentagon anyway has already determined it will keep 120,000 troops in
Iraq
into at least 2007, even if a withdrawal is demanded tomorrow.
Predictably, the Shi'ites don't want the
US
military to leave - at least for now. Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the Da'wa Party leader and strong contender for one of the three top posts, has repeatedly said this would lead to a bloodbath. But both Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the
SCIRI's No 1, and interim President Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, agree: the
US
military must begin a substantial withdrawal by the end of 2005.
Shi'ite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr is just waiting to pounce. It's increasingly possible that the Sadrists who contested the elections may capture
something like 7% of the seats in the new assembly. They've already said they will demand an immediate timetable for total
US
withdrawal. Muqtada wants the Americans out and he wants them out now. That's also exactly what disgruntled, religious Sunnis want. This spells a possible alliance between the Shi'ite urban proletariat and middle-class
religious Sunnis - one more nail in the coffin of the myth propagated by the Bush administration that the resistance against the occupation is dominated by "terrorists". Significantly, Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi,
the leader of the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (
AMS
), has said he is in close contact with the Sadrists.
An extraordinary new development in
Baghdad
is that now the
AMS
is floating a clear proposal: we accept the new elected government as legitimate, as long as it sets a definitive timetable for
US
withdrawal. Although this is what the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want, nobody - no Shi'ite party, no Kurdish party, not even Sistani himself - is contemplating it at this stage. Baghdad sources tell Asia Times
Online that the
AMS
would even issue a fatwa (religious edict) calling for the end of the resistance if the new government sets a date for US withdrawal in writing - with the United Nations as a watchdog. If true, that
would certainly be the only way to lead the
Baghdad
sniper to retire his rifle.
What you want is not what you get
UIA spokesmen are saying that the Shi'ite alliance will capture half of the seats in the 275-member parliament, or a little less than 140 seats. They would need
182 to govern by themselves, without a coalition. The Kurds believe they will get about 65 seats: this only happened because the Sunni vote ranged from weak to non-existent. (Election results were due on Thursday, but
were delayed over the re-examination of some ballot boxes.)
The consensus in rumor-filled
Baghdad
is that really bad news would mean the Shi'ites capturing 140 seats, the Kurds from 75 to 85 seats, and Allawi's list the rest. Sunnis in
Baghdad
are very gloomy: it looks like the bad-news scenario - a Shi'ite/Kurd landslide - is about to happen, with Kurds bragging they may have captured as many as 75 seats.
The UIA may be Shi'ite-dominated, but it
contains more than 20 groups, movements and political parties - Christians, Turkomans, even Sunnis and Kurds, including the Badr Organization (the former Badr Brigades, trained by the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards), the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq and the Islamic Union for Iraqi Turkomans.
The only Iraqi government that would have a minimum of stability would be a UIA/Kurdish alliance. It's very
unlikely to happen, and even if it did it would send even moderate Sunni Arabs into open guerrilla mode. The Shi'ite religious parties in the UIA want Sharia law. The White House is relying on the Kurds to veto Sharia
law. The relatively secular Kurds are obsessed with loose federalism and a fully fledged, autonomous
Kurdistan
province. They want nothing less than the presidency for Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan
leader Jalal Talabani.
The current foreign minister, the affable Kurd Hoshyar Zebari, says that the only way to placate the Sunnis would be to offer them one of the key three posts - president, prime minister or
Speaker of the National Assembly. It may not be enough. Sunni Arabs know the Kurds supported the war and occupation of
Iraq
and have been a de facto
US
protectorate for more than a decade. Sunni Arabs also know that the only indigenous allies the Americans have at the moment are the Kurdish tribes: the Kurdish 36th Command Battalion, for instance, helped the
marines to attack Sunni Arab Fallujah. Many Sunnis, even moderate, consider the Kurds traitors.
What the Kurdish tribal chiefs really want is the ultimate prize: they want independence (it could even be some kind
of US-Israeli protectorate) and they want
Kirkuk
's oil. All of this, for them, is non-negotiable. Supposing
Turkey
- a key
North Atlantic
Treaty Organization ally dreaming of being accepted by the European Union - buries the Kurdish dream, and the Americans cannot deliver, it's fair to assume that even the Kurds will abandon the Americans.
Meanwhile,
in a Najaf still under piles of rubble there's widespread fear that in the end the same former
CIA
asset Allawi will continue to be prime minister. Allawi has been controlling Iraqi security for more than six months now. His new Iraqi National Guard is a remix of Saddam's security - and not by any coincidence
infested with Saddam's men: after all, Allawi is also a former Ba'athist.
As the Bush administration needs a ruthless Iraqi police state to fight not only the resistance but all kinds of emerging protests against
the appalling living conditions throughout the country, Allawi is indeed "the Americans' man", as he is known in Baghdad. His tough-guy profile will be his main argument to convince the UIA he should remain as
premier. But
Baghdad
sources tell
Asia
Times Online that this is all cosmetic anyway: only the terminally naive may believe that the Washington-Green Zone axis is not controlling the selection of the top three posts.
No surrender
The Bush administration script is well known:
Iraq
was "liberated" from "tyranny" and the "insurgents" are fighting democracy - of which the elections were the first manifestation. These are the facts:
Iraq
was conquered, not liberated; the new government will not have any say in economic and oil issues; and the resistance fights the occupying power, not democracy.
Sistani sold the elections to the pious Shi'ite
masses as the first step toward the end of the occupation. In the next few months his promise will be subjected to a groundbreaking reality test. Shi'ites at the polls unmistakably said that they were voting to expel the
Americans, not to legitimize them.
If the Kurds get too much power, if the Shi'ite list disintegrates, if the US keeps building its sprawling military bases - which means they will be in Iraq for the long run,
supported by puppet governments - the Sunni resistance will definitely become a national, Sunni-Shi'ite resistance. As for "terrorism", according to Baghdad sources, an overwhelming number of moderate, secular
Sunnis and Shi'ites are convinced that "arch terrorist" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is being exploited in a
CIA
black-ops designed to exacerbate ethnic tensions.
Many Israeli and American intellectuals and officials are already busy preparing global public opinion, calling for an independent
Kurdistan
. One of the top-flight propagandists is ambassador Peter Galbraith, one of the negotiators of the
Dayton
accords and currently a professor at the
National
War
College
.
Independence
is what the Kurdish leadership wants. Kurds hate the idea of
Iraq
: the Iraqi flag is practically forbidden in some remote mountainous areas. Kurds refuse to hand the control of their borders to Arab troops from
Baghdad
. Former
US
secretary of state Henry Kissinger is enthusiastically calling for a
Kurdistan
, a Sunni center and a Shi'ite south. Why not three weak countries instead of one strong, united
Iraq
? It's divide and conquer all over again.
The key reason for the war was control of Iraqi oil, supported by the installation of strategic
US
military bases. The key question now is which Iraqis will embrace the agenda of the Bush administration. Secular, moderate Sunni observers in
Baghdad
simply cannot believe the Shi'ite leadership will maintain public support for the rest of the year without telling the Americans to leave.
Moreover, the majority of Iraqis - those who voted and especially those
who didn't - are not willing to surrender their oil, their economy and their land to corporate
America
. The popular resistance, on a national level, tends only to increase. Shi'ites - from Sistani to the SCIRI - better not enter into a Faustian pact.