Shiites Humiliate
Bush
By GARY LEUPP
"The occupation force is
primarily responsible for the pure blood that was spilt in holy
Al-Najaf, the blood of al-Hakim and the faithful group that was
present near the mosque. This force is primarily responsible for
all this blood and the blood that is shed all over Iraq every day.
Iraq must not remain occupied and the occupation must leave so
that we can build Iraq as God wants us to do."
The remarkable funeral oration by
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, brother of Iraq's most prominent Shiite cleric
and political figure, the slain Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim,
might just prove the death-knell of the occupation and even the
neocons' whole world-changing project. Last month's horrific
car-bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, which may have taken
the lives of up to 125 people, was itself, as the BBC put it,
"a massive setback for coalition forces" regardless of who
did it. But for the dead cleric's brother, who (still) sits on
Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, to tell a crowd of half a
million grieving Shiites Sept. 1 that occupation forces bear primary
responsibility for all the bloodshed is perhaps an equal
setback. Embarrassing, too, that two Shiite members on the 25-member
puppet council (Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum and Mohsen Abdul Hamid) have
stepped down over the Najaf episode. They like most Iraqis protest
the lack of security, electricity and water resulting from the
invasion. When even those most willing to cooperate with you start
publicly dissing you---and bringing God into it---you know
you're in trouble.
Earlier, at the shrine of Hussein in Karbala, where al-Hakim's
coffin was placed for the night August 31, a cleric boomed through
the loudspeaker: "Yesterday we faced the tanks of Saddam
Hussein. Today the tanks of the Americans. We are not afraid of the
Americans, who are not innocent of the blood of" al-Hakim. This
couldn't have sounded good to the occupying forces. Nor the chant of
mourners marching through Baghdad, beating their chests: "We
will humiliate Saddam, we will humiliate Bush" (New York
Times, Aug. 31). Some perhaps remembered how Bush Sr., having
encouraged the Shiites to rise up after the first Gulf War, left
them stranded as Saddam's forces slaughtered them in their
thousands.
To date, the "coalition
forces" have met with particular hostility in the "Sunni
Triangle," while enjoying more cooperation from the Shiites and
Kurds. But the Kurds (who are ethnically distinct from the Iraqi
Arabs, and while mostly Sunni also include some Shiites) may also be
souring on the occupation. The new "foreign minister"
appointed by the Governing Council, Hoshiyar Zebari (who is
Kurdish), is already at loggerheads with the U.S. over plans to
invite Turkish "peace-keeping" forces into Iraq, warning
"it could lead to destabilization." (The Turkish
government has treated its large Kurdish population brutally, and
has repeatedly engaged Kurdish guerrillas on Iraqi soil. While
Washington might think it useful to deploy some Muslim troops in
Iraq to prettify the occupation, the complexities of relations
within the Muslim world seem lost upon it.) Again, when your own
quislings, who stand between you and masses of (armed) angry people,
start raising objections to your plans, you're in trouble.
While the entire Iraqi population
poses a problem for the "coalition," the Shiites pose some
particular problems. About 15% of the world's billion plus Muslims
are Shiites. They are the majority population in only five
countries: non-Arab Iran (93%), which is half the Shiite world, and
Azerbaijan (61%); and the Arab nations of Bahrain (65%), and Iraq
(60%). The Shiite world thus cuts a swath down from the Caspian Sea
to the Gulf of Oman and way up to the borders of Central Asia. There
are also millions in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, and
in South Asia. There are over twice as many Shiites in Pakistan (27
million) as in Iraq (11 million), and 26 million in India, although
they represent fewer than three percent of the Indian population.
Shiism (with smaller presence in Africa and Southeast Asia) thus
straddles the Arab and Indo-Iranian worlds, and southeast Iraq is
precisely where those worlds intersect. Iraq is the only
sizeable Arab country with a majority Shiite population, and those
Shiites have historical ties to neighboring Iran. There are almost
two million Arabs on the Iranian side of the border with Iraq.
During the Saddam years tens of thousands of Iraqis, including
Shiite clerics, took refuge in Iran. In 1980, Saddam Hussein
expelled 40,000 ethnically Iranian Shiites. Despite the brutal war
between the countries during the 1980s, their Shiite communities,
while differing in language and culture, enjoy close ties. The
mullahs in Teheran (if they aren't overthrown) will thus probably
expect to have some say in Iraq's future.
So of course, near term, will the
U.S. occupiers, who indeed in Colin Powell's words, demand the
"dominant role." Their attitude towards Shiism is
conditioned primarily by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The
overthrow of the Shah resulted from the most genuine, mass-based
revolutionary movement ever to occur in the Islamic world. Its
spiritual leader was the Ayatollah Khomeini, but its foot soldiers
included a wide ideological spectrum: the "Islamic
Marxists" of the Mujahadeen Khalq; the Fedayeen; the Maoist
Sarbederan; the pro-Soviet Tudeh; and of course the Shiite groups
led by the clerics. Their revolution was quickly hijacked by the
mullahs, who crushed the secular left. The Carter administration,
shocked by the revolution, allowed the Shah (viewed as a murderous
criminal by most Iranians) refuge in the U.S., and was thus
confronted with the protracted "Hostage Crisis" ending
only on the day of Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
Of course, Shiism under the
mullocracy was fundamentally no different from Shiism under the
Shah, with which the U.S. picked no quarrel. But the Shah, placed in
power by the CIA in one of its best-documented and well-known
escapades in 1953, stripped lands from the mosques in his
"White Revolution," and otherwise alienated the Shiite
clergy. With his fall, they obtained their revenge, creating the
present regime, which has come to rival the Shah's in its
unpopularity. In any case, the "loss" of Iran was an
incalculable blow to U.S. policy in the region, and subsequent U.S.
policy towards neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq has to be understood
in that light. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan somewhat
reduced the bitterness of the Iranian setback, while U.S.-abetted
Iraqi successes against Iran in the bloody 1980s war reduced the
threat posed by the mullahs' regime.
U.S. officials, analysts and
journalists castigated the "Islamic fundamentalism" in
Iran (a specific form rooted in Shiism) long before they attacked
Sunni Muslim movements under that rubric. Indeed, while Carter
was president, his administration actively encouraged (mostly Sunni)
Islamic fundamentalists to wage jihad against the pro-Soviet
regime in Afghanistan, nurturing the very forces (such as Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar) that now confront the U.S.-installed regime in
Afghanistan. As recently as 1996, Zalmay Khalilzad, one-time Bush
adviser and now top U.S. representative in Afghanistan, was writing
that the Taliban's Sunni Islam did not pose a threat to the U.S.
comparable to the Shiite variant of Islam found in Iran! But
now the focus is on Sunni schools (like the Wahhabi,
historically very hostile to the Shiites), while ironically the U.S.
procurator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, must try to win local
Shiite support.
Problem is, maybe he can't.
He's already stated very clearly that the U.S. will not allow an
Iranian-type Shiite Islamic state. Not even if that's what the local
folks want. It would, he avers, be a threat to U.S. security. He's
telling the Shiites, in effect: We want your support. We
really do. We want to work with you. Over half our handpicked local
leadership team is Shiite. But we (like Saddam) insist upon a
secular state. Unlike Saddam, we'd like two or more freely competing
parties, committed to parliamentarism and free enterprise, just to
make sure that all voices are heard, like in the American
model political system. But the last thing we want is for you to
link up with Iran.
So any Iraqis agitating for such a
state, and, angered by the unending occupation and its manifest
inability or unwillingness to meet popular demands (only some of
them rooted in Shiism), motivated to join the growing resistance
movement, will be tarred as "terrorists." They will be
"Shiite terrorists," supported of course by the
neighboring country and center of the Shiite world, Axis of Evil
lynchpin, Iran. Meanwhile, supposedly "fanatical" aspects
of Shiite religious practice (notably, the ritualistic
breast-beating and self-flagellation) might be emphasized to
dehumanize these particular "terrorists" in the low
stooping American media.
Still, since Washington doesn't want
to alienate 130 million or so Shiites, we'll be told that, no, of
course, Shiism itself isn't the problem. "We know that Shiism's
a religion of peace," Bush will announce pleasantly to Shiite
children invited to the White House to commemorate, say, the Yom
Ashura holiday that marks the death of Hussein ibn Ali, as the
Defense Policy Board discusses how to prevent another Iran.
Meanwhile, the three million Shiites in Yemen, the 1.4 million
Shiites in Lebanon (where in 1983 a Shiite truck bomber blew up a
U.S. military barracks, killing 243 Marines), and the 1.3 million in
Syria (which supports the Shiite Hezbollah organization in Lebanon)
will be watching carefully. The 3.5 million Shiites in Afghanistan
(mostly Hazzaras) have their own problems, but events in Iraq might
affect their perception of the U.S. forces in their still unstable
country. Most importantly, the 61 million Iranian Shiites will be
watching how their coreligionists deal with the occupation of Iraq.
Meanwhile, work on the Bushehr
nuclear reactor continues, and the U.S. as global hegemon has made
clear that Iran must not follow in the footsteps of Israel, Pakistan
and India in developing nuclear weapons, or if defiant, face the
consequences. Imagine what might happen if either the U.S. or Israel
(which bombed Iraq's French-built Osiraq reactor in 1981 in an
action condemned by the U.S. and the whole UN), were to conduct a
"pre-emptive strike" on Bushehr, ostensibly to protect its
(nuclear) self. Or if Israel were to re-invade Lebanon to crush
Hezbollah. The Shiite world would not react well. Such actions might
affect Yemen's "anti-terrorist" cooperation with the U.S.
and efforts to cultivate the 600,000 Saudi Shiites, who happen to
live around the oil fields and whom some neocons wanted to exploit
as allies against the Wahhabi-based regime in Riyadh, creating a
client state Republic of Eastern Arabia.
So in the unfolding geopolitical
drama, Shiites really matter, and as the Shah learned, when
millions of them are out in the streets, they can indeed humiliate
those who have humiliated them. The "Sunni triangle"
causing U.S. forces so much trouble at present is a mere detail
within the surrounding Shiite map. If (as many are predicting)
Iraq's Shiites rise up against the occupation, the neocon's dreams
might soon be reduced to rubble, like the mix of stone and wasted
humanity they're still cleaning up outside the mosque in Najaf.
________
Note on the Shiite belief system:
The key difference between Shiism and Sunni Islam is that the
Shiites (who are divided into a number of schools) believe that a
terrible historic injustice occurred in the early history of the
Muslim community. After the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, they
believe, leadership of the emergent community ought to have passed
to his son-in-law Ali. (This is the Ali entombed in the Imam Ali
Mosque.) It didn't. Ali's son, the Imam Hussein, and 90 of his
followers then perished in the battle of Karbala, fought against
forces of the sixth caliph, in 680. Annual commemorations of this
death, accompanied by dramatic mourning rituals, are believed to
generate merit; Fatima, the Prophet's daughter, will at the end of
time gather the tears of the Karbala mourners' into her apron,
rewarding those who have shed them. Shiites believe that the Twelfth
Imam, successor to Hussein, was hidden by God in a cave below a
mosque in Samarra in 874.
He was only seven years old at the
time; he remains there until God reveals him and he, the Hidden Imam
or Mahdi, comes to guide humankind. In the interim, various figures
have claimed to be representatives of the Hidden Imam or even the
Mahdi himself. Most of the key religious figures revered by the
Shiites died as martyrs; Baqr al-Hakim will be counted as another.
Thus deep grief and sense of victimhood, a will to martyrdom,
millenarian expectations, and the occasional appearance of
charismatic leaders that build upon these feelings, characterize the
Shiite faith. Surely some of the neocons, including a few brilliant
academics, know all this, and only sheer arrogance can account for
their expectation that the Shiites might, like the ridiculous and
discredited Ahmad Chalabi, be drawn en masse to embrace their
own re-colonization rather than attempt some eschatological
breakthrough following years of victimization by the U.S., the UN,
and Saddam.
The Anglo-American troops in the
field, meanwhile (some of whom still really believe Iraq caused
9-11) can't be expected to grasp the religious context, or the
geopolitics of Shiism. If they did, going about their duties, they
might have even greater cause for anxiety. For their sake, their
families' sake, the Iraqis' and the world's sake, they should (as
the dead man's brother urges) be brought home now.
Gary Leupp is an an associate
professor in the Department of History at Tufts University and
coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.
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