Should Bush be Scared of Iraq’s Sistani?

The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, said it all, succinctly, in its op-ed page cartoon of January 16. It showed a worried-looking Martian standing on the Red Planet with a placard in his hand that read: Mr Bush,Please! There’s NobodyHere to Liberate!

The Star cartoon came two days after Bush launched a new Space programme aimed at landing an American on the Mars, a decade or two hence, just as it had landed a man on the Moon in 1969.

But the cartoon could have also carried a sequel to it showing the Iraqi people holding banners and placards saying, Mr. Bush! There’s No Liberation Here!

The day after Bush triumphantly unveiled plans to take a shot at colonising Mars—because he and his neo cons have an unbounded appetite for imperialism—the Iraqis marched in tens of thousands on the streets of the southern city of Basra, otherwise claimed to be peaceful in marked contrast to the violence-prone so- called Sunni Triangle of central Iraq. The marchers were protesting in favour of the Grand Ayotallah, Ali Sistani’s demand for direct elections for a constituent assembly in Iraq to write a new constitution for the country.

Just as Bush is now claiming to send expeditions to Mars to explore it for mankind, he has been waxing eloquent for months to morphe Iraq into a model of democracy in the Arab world.

Skeptics of his Mars plans in America are already debunking the Bush initiative as nothing more than an election-year gimmick. The U.S., in the jaws of an economic crunch, simply doesn’t have hundreds of billions of dollars that would be needed to put man on Mars. Bush has already drained the treasury of at least 200 billion dollars on his adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both are proving to be ill-fated and costly, in every sense of the term.

Like the Mars cover, Bush has gone through several foils on Iraq.

His initial Iraq foil was to cleanse it of its alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction but to date, not a shred of them has been found. So he and his neo con minions have stopped talking of them at all.

The second foil was that bush, the good samaritan, had ventured into Iraq to deliver it from its evil dictator and despot, Saddam Hussain. Well, Saddam has ben in the slammer for at least a month, but there is no indication yet of Lone Ranger Bush packing his bags and leaving the Iraqis to deal with their prised trophy by themselves.

Bush’s latest tack on Iraq is that he is still there—having already ‘liberated’ the Iraqi people from the demon of Saddam—so that he may deliver the star-struck Iraqis into the haven of democracy. He has worked out a time-table to accomplish this mission by the end of June this year—in time to chime with his foregone nomination by the Republican Party to make a pitch for his re-election to the White House. Or will it be his first genuine ‘election’ if he wins in November, because he didn’t win fair and square in 2000 but was catapulted into the White House, courtesy of his dad’s hand-picked judges of the U.S.Supreme Court?

Like his own enigmatic induction into the world’s highest office, Bush’s democracy cornucopia for Iraq is wrapped in mystery and riddled with controversy.

That his democracy paradigm for Iraq is as murky as was his own ‘victory’ in 2000 is evident from the devious plan hatched by him and his cohorts to cheat the Iraqis out of a genuine democracy, just the way poor Al Gore was denied the fruit of victory he deserved.

The Bush plan for democracy starts with an open and blatant defiance of the first fundamental of democracy: a direct and open election, on the basis of adult franchise.

The democracy package that Paul Bremmer, the Bush viceroy in Iraq, badgered the supine Iraqi Governing Council ( IGC ) to accept and sign last November, is so shrouded in confusion that some of his own staff members find hard to understand and impossible to implement. It goes something like this: IGC and local representatives of all 16 of the Iraqi Governorates ( themselves to be nominated by IGC, which in reality means the Americans ) will form an interin ‘Constituent Assembly’. This ‘Assembly’ will be charged with ratifying the new constitution of Iraq currently being written by IGC (which, again, means being written by the American occupying authority ). The same ‘Assembly’ will also ‘nominate’ an interim government for Iraq which will, nominally, take over authority of governing Iraq from the American occupiers by June 30th this year. Thereafter, the interim or provisional Iraqi government will have a year or two to call for general elections in the country.

It doesn’t take a genius to fathom the logic of American reluctance to play by the universal rules of the book of democracy in Iraq.

Going by the book and organising free general elections in Iraq—a fundamental requirement of democracy—would usher in, for the first time in modern Iraq’s 82 year history—rule by its Shiite majority. The Iraqi Shiias make up at least 65 per cent of Iraq’s population but were consistently denied their fundamental right to rule by a series of foreign-inspired hands dictating Iraq’s fate. Saddam was their worst tormentor.

But now the Iraqi Shiias seem to have decided to take the bull by its horns and stand up for the rights denied to them for so long.

Bush’s bluff in Iraq is being called by the Grand Ayotallah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shiite leader. He is demanding direct elections to the constituent assembly so that it truly reflects the demographic reality of Iraq and safeguards the interests of its ethnic majority, as well as of minorities. In other words, he is staking a direct and unequivocal claim of the Shiite right to rule Iraq.

Sistani, of Iranian provenance, is one of only five living Grand Ayotallahs. He chose to lie low in the early months of U.S. occupation of Iraq, despite provocations aplenty against him. His authority as the marjaa ( sole spokesman )of the Iraqi Shiias was challenged by an upstart Iraqi-born firebrand youth, Moqtada Al Sadr, son of Ayotallah Sadiq Al Sadr who was murdered by Saddam in 1999. Moqtada was obviously prompted by some vested interest to throw a challenge to Sistani. But the Grand Ayotallah refused to be provoked and graciously weathered that storm. With aplomb, he not only saved his own dignity but also the unity of the Iraqi Shiias.

So Bush has got to be seriously scared of the challenge mounted to his game plan by the soft-spoken Ali Sistani.

That neither he nor his pro-consul in Baghdad, Paul Bremmer, underestimates the importance of Sistani’s thus far polite and civilised argument is borne out by Bremmer’s desparate rush to Washington to consult his ‘emperor’ within hours of Sistani calling for direct elections. Bremmer, more than Bush, knows how seriously, and ominously, Sistani could turn the screws on Bush’s disingenuous scheme to have his cake and eat it,too.

Bremmer is also keenly aware that the excuse of there being not enough time to organise direct elections is patently lame and absurd. Iraq used to hold elections under Saddam, no matter how shady or questionable those one-party elections may have been. But there are electoral rolls from the past which could be updated with a bit of effort.

Moreover, as the UN has also hinted at, there are complete records of the Iraqi people who were all covered under Saddam’s marvelously efficient rationing system. The UN humanitarian programme in Iraq borrowed heavily from that rationing system and found it fool-proof. Simply dusting those lists could easily provide the backbone for fresh electoral rolls as demanded by Sistani.

Bush’s devious scheme for controlled democracy in Iraq is under mortal threat from Sistani’s straightforward and legitimate demand for free and direct elections. Bush can’t even call it anything but democratic because that’s what democracy is basically all about. Of course, it will deprive him to hammer into shape a ‘Yes, Washington’ democracy in Iraq run by sycophants without constituencies and constantly looking up to their American mentors for cover and succour.

Bush’s biggest dilemma is that he can’t blame anyone for prompting Sistani; not even Iran, a favourite bogey for the Bush neo cons on anything going wrong with their macabre schemes for an American-proxy Iraq.

President Khatami of Iran pre-empted the blame game and finger pointing by the neo cons when he cleverly accepted IGC as representing the Iraqi people the day after Bremmer had bamboozled its cowering members to agree to the transfer of sovereignty plan by the middle of 2004. Khatami’s pre-emption robs Bush of any chance to blame Sistani for taking his cue from Tehran because Sistani is refusing to accept IGC’s legitimacy or the American-given authority.

Bush’s most frightening nightmare is Sistani giving a call to his followers to rise in revolt against the dictatorial American occupation if his democratic demand for direct elections is spurned. That would make the so-called Sunni Triangle uprising look like a picnic party.

Equally frightening is the prospect of a divided Iraq, with the Shiias running southern Iraq as a sovereign entity in cahoots with Iran. Such a truncated Iraq would not only become a beehive of ethnic free-for-all but also a cockpit of anti-American fundamentalism. For Washington there couldn’t be a more sinister scenario than that: a Wahabi-controlled Saudi Arabia on the western-end of the Gulf and a rebellious Shiia-dominated Iraq on its eastern-end. For Washington, that would be the worst of the two worlds.