Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's (Juan Cole -role of the clergy)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/worst/index.html

Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's

As Americans finally begin to grasp the magnitude of the Iraq catastrophe, Bush's popularity hits a new low.

By Juan Cole

March 1, 2006 |


......Tactically, strategically and politically Bush now finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. With Americans increasingly fed up with the Iraq debacle, he needs to start drawing down troops soon, but he can't do it while the country teeters on the brink of civil war. If civil war does break out, a U.S. withdrawal will look even more like cutting and running -- under these circumstances, not even Karl Rove will be able to figure out a way to get away with simply declaring victory and going home. Yet if American troops stay, they have no good options either. The U.S. desperately needs to keep the Sunnis in the government, but if Shiites launch reprisal attacks against Sunnis, Americans will not be able to respond for fear that the Shiites, too, will turn on them -- as indeed they have already begun to do. And as the shrine bombing shows, Iraq is a vial of nitroglycerine that can be set off with one shake. Imagine what would happen if one of the leading clerics, Sunni or Shiite, was assassinated. It is difficult to say how aware Bush is of the reality in Iraq, but some part of him must be cursing the day he decided to invade it.

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Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, Shiite Iran's theocratic ruler, blasted the Americans over the destruction of the shrine, saying that they had blown it up in conjunction with the Israelis. The implausibility of the charge did not prevent it being taken seriously by Shiite crowds and protesters from Beirut, Lebanon, to Karachi, Pakistan. For the Shiite clerics, Islam is a form of soft power that they can deploy against the United States at will. Virtually any bad thing that happens to Muslims or their holy places is laid at the feet of the Americans. This "paranoid style" in Middle Eastern thinking about the West has a long history, but the Iraq war has been interpreted as evidence that the conspiracy theories were correct all along, and had made this way of thinking more widespread and powerful. Khamenei said on Monday, "The Americans are trying to provoke ethnic and religious war in Iraq and the tragic incident in Samarra is one instance in this regard." He said that Iraq is symbolic of American failure in the region, and went on to call for Muslim states to support the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which won the recent elections.


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These three Iraqi clerics all employed their influence and authority among the Shiite rank and file to make the Samarra bombing work for them politically. Sistani expanded his militia and stayed at the forefront of the movement by encouraging peaceful rallies. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim used the explosion in Samarra to bolster his own authority. He remonstrated with the American ambassador, saying it was not reasonable to expect the religious Shiites, who won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, to give up their claim on the ministry of interior, and that, indeed, Khalilzad had helped provoke the troubles with his assertions to that effect earlier. Muqtada al-Sadr used the incident to push for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, something he has wanted since the fall of Saddam. Abroad, Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei blamed Bush and his Israeli allies, a monstrous charge but nevertheless one widely believed.

For the first three years of this colossal misadventure, Bush and his political advisors were able to obscure Iraq's harsh reality beneath a smoke screen of anti-terrorist fearmongering and patriotic fervor. But the smoke is blowing away. Bush emerged from this bloody week much feebler than ever before, both with regard to the U.S. public and with regard to that of Iraq. The problem for him is that Iraq has several more shrines, and if they are destroyed, he will again face the prospect of popular turbulence, and possibly calamity. Iraq, drifting toward theocracy and something approaching civil war, looks less and less like a model for the region, and more and more like an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party.