[Mb-civic] FW: Newsweek: Sandbagged in Baghdad

[Golsorkhi]

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From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:54:50 -0500
Subject: Newsweek: Sandbagged in Baghdad

  MSNBC.com

Sandbagged in Baghdad

As bad as things are in Iraq, the Americans can thank Iranian
influences for preventing a total collapse. Why, for better or worse,
Iraq¹s elections have to be held on time

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
Newsweek
Updated: 2:05 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2005


Jan. 20 - As I sat in the Baghdad office of an influential Coalition
official last week, I was surprised to hear him complaining about
sandbags. It¹s a measure of the insecurity of the place that deep in
the heavily fortified Green Zone, a guy like this would still get a
little antsy about the layer upon layer of protective barriers between
the bed where he sleeps and the mortars and rockets that often descend
on this, the ultimate gated community. But for Mr. Coalition, the
sandbags are also a symbol of good intentions gone awry‹that weird sort
of political correctness that sometimes infects the tough-guy Bush
administration.

The sandbags, you see, are biodegradable. When they were first thrown
up around U.S.-occupied buildings in 2003 nobody thought they¹d have to
last very long. The Iraqi insurgency looked like a minor headache back
then, and sandbags were a short-term solution to what seemed a
short-term problem. So some lowly American bureaucrat who bought into
this vision brought eco-friendly sandbags that tattered and dissolved
in sun and rain, leaving my friend¹s digs, today, surrounded by
something less akin to a fortress than to a sandcastle.

It¹s that same sort of short-term expediency with an eye on long-term
ideals‹and a remarkable obliviousness to miserable medium-term
realities‹that riled up some of those Democratic U.S. senators grilling
Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice this week. They wanted to
talk about past mistakes and the highly problematic here and now. She
wanted to prove she had that vision thing for the future. And, let¹s be
straight, that vision thing really is important. You¹ve got to keep
your eye on the prize: freedom, democracy, all those important
principles that President George W. Bush extols so often and so
effectively, including in today¹s inaugural address. But you¹ve also
got to be careful you don¹t fall into a bottomless pit on your way
there.

By far the most obvious trap for American and regional interests right
now is a short-term strategy that could well put the long-term future
of Iraqi democracy in the hands of Iran¹s mullahcracy. Two years ago,
this seemed a minor risk compared to the big-picture accomplishment of
ousting the dictator and eventually installing majority rule. No
longer. Faced with one crisis after another in Iraq, and a growing
Sunni Arab insurgency, Washington has come to rely on the good offices
of Ayatollah Ali Sistani to maintain any semblance of stability in the
country.

Sistani has always supported elections for a simple reason. He
calculates that Iraq¹s Shiites make up 60 percent of the population. If
they turn out to vote‹and he has said it¹s their religious duty to do
so‹then he figures Shiites will dominate the government. Just to make
sure, he has endorsed a list of candidates who are expected to win
anywhere from 100 to 150 of the 275 seats in the constituent assembly.
The official name of the list is the United Iraqi Alliance, or, more
briefly, ³169,² which is its position on the ballot. Its official
symbol is a lighted candle, as in the proverbial saying, ³It is better
to light one candle than to curse the darkness.² But more generally
it¹s called ³Sistani¹s List,² or ³the Persian List,² even by people in
the interim government. Sistani¹s wise face, black-turbaned,
white-bearded, graces campaign posters, and the list¹s electoral anthem
goes a step further on the religious front, saying a vote for the list
is a vote for the Imam Hussein, the most revered historical figure in
Shia Islam.


Sistani himself is not on the list. Again, for a simple reason. He is
an Iranian citizen and isn¹t eligible to vote, much less to run.
Moreover, we don¹t know the identities of all the people who are on the
list. Many names have been withheld for security reasons. Among the few
we do know are the redoubtable Ahmad Chalabi, jettisoned by his
erstwhile backers in the Bush administration amid accusations he was
acting as an Iranian agent. There are also the leaders of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was based in Tehran
for more than two decades. (According to one insider, the original
draft of the Iraqi constitution this party wants to propose was
actually written in Persian.) There¹s also the Dawa Party, which the
United States blamed for some of the most ferocious terrorist attacks
against Americans in the 1980s, at a time, to be sure, when the Reagan
administration was backing Saddam.

Are these people on the Iranian government payroll? You bet, one of my
friends on the list tells me, and he includes himself. ³Those Shia who
claim they are not funded by Iran would have to prove otherwise,² he
says, ³and probably they could not.²

  For all that, Washington is clinging to a belief‹a hope‹that Sistani¹s
List will not pull Iraq into the orbit of the Iranian theocracy, even
if it wins an absolute majority. There are Shia political and
theological reasons, Iraqi nationalist reasons and historical reasons
that might be true. Let¹s hope. But true or not, the fact is Washington
just doesn¹t have much choice anymore. 

  When I was in Baghdad last week and the week before, I pressed every
official I saw to tell me anything that might be better now than it was
just last summer, which was already pretty awful. It¹s clear the Sunni
insurgency is worse. Out and out terrorism is worse. The danger to
foreigners is worse. Crime is worse. Public services are worse. But
last summer, the United States was facing a Shiite insurgency led by
Moqtada al-Sadr, the renegade offspring of another ayatollah. After
many of Sadr¹s forces were crushed by U.S. Marines, Sistani imposed a
truce that brought some of Sadr¹s backers into the electoral bid for
overall Shiite dominance of the country.

There¹s been relative calm in Shiite areas since. But there¹s no
question of postponing the polling on Jan. 30, lest the Shiites erupt
again. There are no guarantees, either, that a new Shia uprising won¹t
start anyway if the religious parties don¹t like the results of the
vote. At the same time, to the extent there are any Iraqi military
forces Washington can rely on, they are largely Kurdish and Shiite,
raising the possibility of mass defections should the political process
take a turn they don¹t like.

None of this offers much hope for quelling the rebellion of Sunni
Arabs. If there¹s growing popular support for what U.S. military
officers like to call ³the bad guys,² and there is, it¹s not because
people want the old Saddamite regime back. It¹s because they resent
American occupation, and they fear a U.S.-sanctioned takeover by
Persians who have been their historical enemies since before the battle
of Qadisiya in the seventh century. In some of the few electoral
debates so far, you even see members of interim Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi¹s party playing this card. ³When we speak, we speak from our
origins as Iraqis,² Iraqi Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan said. ³When
Ahmad Chalabi speaks defending Iran, he speaks for his origins.² (For
good measure, Shaalan also accused Chalabi of visiting Israel three
times in the last 10 years, which is evidently a terrible sin in Iraqi
politics.)

These trends don¹t hold much hope for American dealings with the
Iranian regime itself, either, even though it¹s allegedly hell-bent on
building nukes. Just this week, Condi Rice put Iran on the new,
improved and expanded Axis of Evil hit parade she dubbed the ³Outposts
of Tyranny.² ³It¹s a dying revolution,² Mr. Coalition said wishfully,
³but it clearly still has claws, and the only hope for it to survive is
to expand.²

  We¹ve made that a whole lot easier, in fact. Our 150,000 soldiers
besieged on the ground in Iraq are less a deterrent to Tehran than
hostages to it. Even if the United States really is sending Special
Operations forces into Iran to prepare some pinpoint bombing raids on
nuclear facilities, as Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker, that¹s
a minor threat to a regime that survived Saddam¹s aggression and the
Taliban¹s fanaticism‹before Washington eliminated both regimes Š with
the best of intentions, of course.

You know, before we get too excited about the sand-castle of democracy
we¹re building in the unwelcoming environment of Iraq, maybe we better
get some more permanent sandbags for Mr. Coalition and his colleagues.

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URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6848850/site/newsweek/

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