[LINK] More on Iraq's Future

[rfmcdonald]

The Washington Post reports that Shiite religious leaders in Iraq want the Shiite-majority south, including the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and Iraq's second city of Basra, to be united in a single state that would be home to more than half of the Iraqi population and governed by Islamic law. Quite apart from what this says about the likely human-rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq, such an overwhelmingly powerful federal unit would dominate the Iraqi state like Prussia within the Second Empire and Weimar Germany, while, like the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic it would be entirely capable of independent statehood in its own right. It's worth noting that, in Lebanon's The Daily Star, Peter Galbraith reports that Iraq is apparently beginning to take its cues from Iran while favouring an Islamic republic at home.

SCIRI and Daawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose making Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law - rather than Iraq's relatively progressive civil code - would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property and child custody. A Daawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not "of the book," such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians and Bahais.

This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam's fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq's southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern - and legislate - without authority from Baghdad, and certainly without any reference to the freedoms incorporated in Iraq's American-written interim constitution - the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL).

Daawa and SCIRI are not just promoting an Iranian-style political system - they are also directly promoting Iranian interests. Abdul Aziz Hakim, the SCIRI leader, has advocated paying Iran billions in reparations for damage done in the Iran-Iraq war, even as the Bush administration has been working to win forgiveness for Iraq's Saddam-era debt. Iraq's Shiite oil minister is promoting construction of an export pipeline for petroleum from Basra to the Iranian port city of Abadan, creating an economic and strategic link between the two historic adversaries that would have been unthinkable until now. Iraq's Shiite government has acknowledged Iraq's responsibility for starting the Iran-Iraq war, and apologized. It is an acknowledgment probably justified by the historical record, but one that has infuriated Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

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On July 7, the Iranian and Iraqi defense ministers signed an agreement on military cooperation that would have Iranians train the Iraqi military. The Iraqi defense minister made a point of saying American views would not count: "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries." However, even if the training is deferred or derailed, it is only the visible - and very much smaller - component of a stealthy Iranian encroachment into Iraq's national institutions and security services.

It was perhaps inevitable that a post-Saddam Iraq would end up this way, and I continue to think that the goal of ending Saddam's dictatorship was worthy (though, alas, horribly executed). Even so, I have to congratulate the United States for managing such a spectacular own goal against its stated geopolitical interests.