David Warren: Trouble (An Iraqi grand ayatollah starts acting Machiavellian)

The Ottawa Citizen ^ | January 17, 2004 | David Warren

[quidnunc]

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, Iraq's highest-ranking Shia cleric, has begun seriously throwing his weight around in Iraq, helping to organize a demonstration in Basra yesterday of tens of thousands of Shia faithful, to chant "No to America!" and demand immediate mass elections — in a country which has not had a reliable census in several decades, and where the infrastructure for a fair general election does not yet exist. Raising the temperature further, the second-ranking Shia cleric, Hojat Al-Islam Ali Abdulhakim Alsafi, has written a sarcastic public letter to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, that is being read in all the mosques.

The Shia of Iraq are not an homogenous and discrete ethnic group. Most are racially and linguistically Arab, which alone distinguishes them from the Shia of Iran. While their numbers are overwhelming in the southern third of Iraq, they may be found everywhere; and among Arab Iraqis, there is some degree of shading between Shia and Sunni sects. Unknown, but very large proportions are not religious; and the tribal orders of the countryside break down in Basra and other large cities. And not all the devoted pay their respects to Ayatollah Sistani.

Nevertheless, Sistani has more prestige than anyone in Iraq, and when he commands the faithful to take to the streets, his orders are echoed in the Friday prayers, and reinforced by stick-wielding zealots.

More fundamentally, power corrupts. I fear that Iraq's Shia clerics and their camp followers have only begun to get a taste of power, and their appetite for it will grow quickly as they acquire more. This in a country with no experience of give-and-take, no machinery of checks and balances — things which take decades or centuries to grow, and require stability.

-snip-

[nuconvert]

Bump

[17th Miss Regt]

You know, it would be sad if a former Baathist were to assassinate this imam and then be killed at the hands of an angry mob.

[MonroeDNA]

Take him out.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

It wouldn't be surprising for Iran to be behind much of this!

[SunStar]

You know, it would be sad if a former Baathist were to assassinate this imam and then be killed at the hands of an angry mob.

Yes, how upsetting this would be... :)

[onedoug]

If he's Islamist, that's enemy enough.