[Mb-civic] Robert FisK:This Election Will Change the World. But Not in the Way the Americans Imagined

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This Election Will Change the World. But Not in the Way the 
Americans Imagined
By Robert Fisk 
The Independent U.K.
Saturday 29 January 2005
Shias are about to inherit Iraq, but the election tomorrow that will 
bring them to power is creating deep fears among the Arab kings 
and dictators of the Middle East that their Sunni leadership is under 
threat.
America has insisted on these elections - which will produce a 
largely Shia parliament representing Iraq's largest religious 
community - because they are supposed to provide an exit strategy 
for embattled US forces, but they seem set to change the 
geopolitical map of the Arab world in ways the Americans could 
never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is the 
law of unintended consequences writ large.
Amid curfews, frontier closures and country-wide travel 
restrictions, voting in Iraq will begin tomorrow under the threat of 
Osama bin Laden's ruling that the poll represents an "apostasy". 
Voting started among expatriate Iraqis yesterday in Britain, the US, 
Sweden, Syria and other countries, but the turnout was much 
smaller than expected.
The Americans have talked up the possibility of massive 
bloodshed tomorrow and US intelligence authorities have warned 
embassy staff in Baghdad that insurgents may have been "saving 
up" suicide bombers for mass attacks on polling stations.
But outside Iraq, Arab leaders are talking of a Shia "Crescent" 
that will run from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon via Syria, whose 
Alawite leadership forms a branch of Shia Islam. The underdogs of 
the Middle East, repressed under the Ottomans, the British and then 
the pro-Western dictators of the region, will be a new and potent 
political force.
While Shia political parties in Iraq have promised that they will not 
demand an Islamic republic - their speeches suggest that they have 
no desire to recreate the Iranian revolution in their country - their 
inevitable victory in an election that Iraq's Sunnis will largely boycott 
mean that this country will become the first Arab nation to be led by 
Shias.
On the surface, this may not be apparent; Iyad Allawi, the former 
CIA agent and current Shia "interim" Prime Minister, is widely tipped 
as the only viable choice for the next prime minister - but the kings 
and emirs of the Gulf are facing the prospect with trepidation.
In Bahrain, a Sunni monarchy rules over a Shia majority that 
staged a mini-insurrection in the 1990s. Saudi Arabia has long 
treated its Shia minority with suspicion and repression.
In the Arab world, they say that God favoured the Shia with oil. 
Shias live above the richest oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and upon 
some of the Kuwaiti oil fields. Apart from Mosul, Iraqi Shias live 
almost exclusively amid their own country's massive oil fields. Iran's 
oil wealth is controlled by the country's overwhelming Shia majority.
What does all this presage for the Sunni potentates of the 
Arabian peninsula? Iraq's new national assembly and the next 
interim government it selects will empower Shias throughout the 
region, inviting them to question why they too cannot be given a fair 
share of their country's decision-making.
The Americans originally feared that parliamentary elections in 
Iraq would create a Shia Islamic republic and made inevitable - and 
unnecessary - warnings to Iran not to interfere in Iraq. But now they 
are far more frightened that without elections the 60 per cent Shia 
community would join the Sunni insurgency.
Tomorrow's poll is thus, for the Americans, a means to an end, a 
way of claiming that - while Iraq may not have become the stable, 
liberal democracy they claimed they would create - it has started its 
journey on the way to Western-style freedom and that American 
forces can leave.
Few in Iraq believe that these elections will end the insurgency, 
let alone bring peace and stability. By holding the poll now - when 
the Shias, who are not fighting the Americans, are voting while the 
Sunnis, who are fighting the Americans, are not - the elections can 
only sharpen the divisions between the country's two largest 
communities.
While Washington had clearly not envisaged the results of its 
invasion in this way, its demand for "democracy" is now moving the 
tectonic plates of the Middle East in a new and uncertain direction. 
The Arab states outside the Shia "Crescent" fear Shia political 
power even more than they are frightened by genuine democracy.
No wonder, then, King Abdullah of Jordan is warning that this 
could destabilise the Gulf and pose a "challenge" to the United 
States. This may also account for the tolerant attitude of Jordan 
towards the insurgency, many of whose leaders freely cross the 
border with Iraq.
The American claim that they move secretly from Syria into Iraq 
appears largely false; the men who run the rebellion against US rule 
in Iraq are not likely to smuggle themselves across the Syrian-Iraqi 
desert when they can travel "legally" across the Jordanian border.
Tomorrow's election may be bloody. It may well produce a 
parliament so top-heavy with Shia candidates that the Americans 
will be tempted to "top up" the Sunni assembly members by 
choosing some of their own, who will inevitably be accused of 
collaboration. But it will establish Shia power in Iraq - and in the 
wider Arab world - for the first time since the great split between 
Sunnis and Shias that followed the death of the Prophet 
Muhammad. 
*** 
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