Sistani speaks

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has finally given his official response to the extremely undemocratic, born-in-Washington plan for a political ‘transition’ in Iraq that was announced November 15.
The word from Sistani’s home in the holy city of Najaf: No go.
This world exclusive was apparently won by Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the WaPo, whose editors rightly put their story on the front page today. Seems one or both of them had submitted written questions to Sistani’s “liaison office” in London, from which the asnwers were then sent back to them– in Iraq, where they’re both working from these days.
The missive from London came in both English and Arabic, they report. They cite what is apparently the English text sent to them. However, over on Juan Cole’s website today, he has done his own translation of what is apparently the Arabic version of the same text. Since I would judge the Arabic version coming out of Najaf/London to be authoritative, and since I respect Juan as an experienced and careful translator who captures the nuance of Arabic when he renders it into his native English, I’ll give you his version here:

“First of all, the preparation of the Iraqi State (Basic) Law for the transitional period is being accomplished by the Interim Governing Council with the Occupation Authority. This process lacks legitimacy. Rather the [Basic Law] must be presented to the [elected] representatives of the Iraqi people for their approval.
“Second, the instrumentality envisaged in this plan for the election of the members of the transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to another process that would so guarantee, that is, to elections. In this way, the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law.” He added, “Perhaps it would be possible to hold the elections on the basis of the ration cards and some other supplementary information.”

This is not the first time Sistani has expressed his firm opinion that Iraqis need elections for any constitutional convention they may be having. Back in late June, as you could read here on JWN, he already stated this.
Why did the White House, Paul Bremer, and the Interim Governing Council think they could finesse the issue with him this time round?
Even this time around, some of the IGC people contacted by Shadid and Chandrasekaran were saying they hoped they could get Sistani to back down. “We need to get him to change his mind,” they quote one IGC member as saying– a person, that is, so lacking in self-confidence in his position that he spoke only on the condition of anonymity. (I really do like it when reporters explicitly say that, as these two do, rather than using phoney-balone talk like “on deep background” which is only paraded to show readers how terribly well-connected the reporter in question is, Bob Woodward-style.)
Sistani’s suggestion that someone organizing an election could use the “Oil for Food” ration lists as a starting point is an eminently sensible one. It is, however, one that the many previous exiles among the IGC cohorts really hate– mainly, one supposes, because their families are not registered on them. But those lists do provide an excellent and fairly recent base-line, and could be updated with a quick household re-survey that could be carried out within two or three months–if the CPA and the IGC really wanted to get the best-available head-count for a speedy election.
As to why people in the supposedly “modern”, hi-tech US military administration now running Iraq should have to worry about the views of someone as supposedly “old-fashioned” or “medieval” as Sistani– well… He actually is acting just as smartly as one might expect from a person who is heir to a great, long tradition of civilization and whose institutions came through the successive periods of Turkish (Sunni) foreign rule, British (Anglican) foreign rule,and local (Baathist) totalitarianism much bloodied but still more or less intact.
How smart is Sistani? Well, just imagine the glee with which he and all of Iraq’s other Shi-ites must be watching the still-unfolding conflict north of Baghdad, between the Sunnis and the occupation forces. Sistani has certainly not given his many followers any go-ahead to join the anti-occupation campaign. He doesn’t have to. He can stymie Bremer’s designs simply by sitting in Najaf and issuing his fatwas and other declarations to the worldwide media.
And mean-time, in that area north of Baghdad, both the US troops and the Shi-ites former oppressors from the Sunni community are getting badly bloodied.
At some point, Sistani might follow the lead given by his Shi-ite co-believers in Lebanon’s Hizbollah (Party of God) movement: In a time of great national stress he might agree graciously to extend his leadership to the whole of the Iraqi people and not just to the 60-plus percent who are Shi-ite.
I should imagine that that all the people in the CPA are running around like headless chickens at the thought that the old fox of Najaf can, with a single stroke of his pen, stymie all their hastily-assembled plans for a carefully orchestrated and oh-so-carefully-timed political “transition” in Iraq. Carefully timed, that is, for it to look good in the US media come November 4, 2004.
We might give this Rovean scheme a working name of something like an “October surprise”. But the Shi-ites of this part of the world have, of course, been down this road a number of times… and not just in 1984…
I was in Beirut in late 1980, and I clearly remember Ayatollah Khomeini’s emissary Mohammed Saleh telling me that Khomeini was quite aware of US election timetables, and quite determined to exploit them for his own purposes… Which on that occasion were directed mainly toward “punishing” poor old Jimmy Carter for the failed hostage-rescue attempt he had made earlier that year… So even though Khomeini’s negotiations with Carter for the release of the hostages were actually just about finished by the end of 1980, Khomeini and his “student” supporters were determined not to release the hostages to Carter, but rather to wait until incoming Pres. R. Reagan was in office. Which was just what happened. Minutes after Reagan took the oath of office the planes carrying the hostages home took off from Teheran airport.
Well, the impact of that was mainly symbolic. (And the whole world got Ronald Reagan as a result. Thanks a lot, guys– I don’t think!)
But my main point is that the people in, around, and from the Shi-ite institutions there in Najaf and Kerbala certainly all share their experiences with each other just as much as any group of Yalies sitting around and yakking with each other 30-40 years after graduation. And these guys in the Shi-ite religious hierarchies have many, many experiences of dealing with and manipulating US (and Israeli) electoral concerns for their own ends, that I’m sure they discuss, share, and reflect on frequently.
And in the US, meanwhile, how much do the people running the country’s policy today known about or understand the Iraqi, Iranian, or other political dynamics in the Middle East? Almost nothing!
I could write hundreds of pages about the systematic destruction over the 20-plus years I’ve lived in the US of the professional cadres in the US government that previously had some working familiarity with the affairs of the Middle East… All done in the name of rooting out those insidious alleged moles called the “State Department Arabists.” Robert Kaplan, the smarmily superficial author who is much beloved by politicians of all stripes in DC, even wrote a whole book to damn and undermine “The Arabists.”
Of course, that campaign was egged on all the time by Israelis of nearly all political stripes. Those Arabists, you see, continued to try to point out that israel’s aggressive policies against its neighbors, and the fact of continuing, strong US support for Israel despite the aggressive and frequently flat-out illegal nature of its policies (as in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan), were causing grave problems for the US itself throughout the non-Israeli Middle East.
When the post-mortem on the whole tragic fiasco of US policy toward Iraq finally gets undertaken, let’s make sure that that part of the back-story that concerns the campaign against executive branch Arabists doesn’t get left out.
In the mean-time, though, we should all be watching the internal politics of Iraq very carefully.
President Sistani in 2004? It’s probably unlikely, since my sense of him is that he prefers to operate behind the scenes. But who knows?
And if Sistani or his protege were to emerge as the person chosen by the Iraqi people in their first fully democratic elections, what then? Well, good luck to them all, I say–Iraq, its people, and its leaders.
Iraq is, after all, their country.
(This latter fact seems to have eluded Li’l Tommy Friedman, who was writing an immense amount of jingoistic, manifest-destiny drivel in today’s NYT: “This war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan… It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot…” Jesus, Tom, give us a break from this nonsense, won’t you?)