Americans, including our President, didn’t know a lot about Iraq or Islam when planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They knew a little more, but nowhere near enough, when the United States launched an invasion of Iraq with the immediate goal of deposing Saddam Hussein’s regime.
We’ve been learning…slowly…more about both Iraq and Islam over the last four years. We seem to have a generalized understanding…now…that Saddam Hussein’s regime was dominated by Arabs from the dominant Sunni sect of Islam. Under Saddam, Iraq was run by the Ba’ath party, which was an essentially secular political ideology. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein took on a more Islamic tone, even adding a Koranic verse to the official Iraqi flag. He began speaking as a defender of the faith that stood up to infidels. This was probably less of a personal conversion to greater faith than it was a cynical effort to shore up domestic support for the continuation of his loathsome regime.
Regardless, Saddam Hussein’s regime had some basic qualities that were poorly understood, or ignored, by the United States. We focused on Saddam’s reliance on a brutal internal security apparatus, but we ignored the religious extremism that his apparatus kept in check. In the most extreme example, the neo-conservatives (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) tried to link Saddam Hussein to Sunni religious extremists. That was a ludicrous assertion. That assertion also worked to cloud the Shi’a religious extremism that Saddam kept under foot.
Our understanding of Shi’a Islam in Iraq was so underdeveloped that we do not appear to have even identified and projected Grand Ayatollah Sistani as the most important person in Iraq, post-Saddam.
Once we arrived in Iraq we quickly realized that ‘the liberated’ (predominately the Shi’a) were not as grateful as the neo-conservatives had anticipated. More importantly, we learned that they would not be cooperative unless we worked in ways that were agreeable to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. We could not set up a secular, pro-western autocracy under Ahmed Chalabi. If we were to have any cooperation at all, we would have to allow for a Shi’a government that expressed the will of the conservative Shi’a clerics. Due to the demographic of Iraq, where conservative Shi’a are a plurality (if not a majority) of the population, it was possible to use a democratic form of government to express the will of the conservative Shi’a clerics. And that is what was done.
But this system alienated the Sunnis, the secular, professional classes from all sects, and the Kurds, who are generally Sunni and generally less rigid in their religious observance.
We all know that the result has been a broiling insurgency, the rise of rival armed militias (death squads), a total breakdown of order, and the outbreak of a sectarian and ethnic civil war. But, it is actually worse than that.
You may remember that when Saddam Hussein was executed it was taped with a video phone. And the audio from the video phone captured the executioners chanting, ‘Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada’.
Moqtada al-Sadr is the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr and son-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr. Baqir al-Sadr was murdered by Saddam in 1980. Sadeq al-Sadr and two of his sons were murdered (presumably by Saddam) in 1999.
When the Americans captured Baghdad, an enormous neighborhood in the city (a Shi’a slum) changed its name from ‘Saddam City’ to ‘Sadr City’ in honor of these martyrs.
Moqtada al-Sadr is not respected as an Ayatollah for his religious knowledge. He is too young and undistinguished as a scholar. He is respected because he comes from a family of distinguished scholars that were killed by Saddam’s Ba’ath regime. He is respected as a spokesman for the poor, and as an Iraqi nationalist that has opposed to occupation of American and British troops from the very beginning. (His nationalism is one reason it is unlikely that he has sought refuge in Iran, as the Bush administration claims).
For four years there has been a tension between the anti-occupation, rabble-rousing, rhetoric of Moqtada al-Sadr and the patient, cooperative, and nonetheless firm pro-Shi’a strategizing of Sistani. Sistani has urged the Shi’a to work on creating democratic institutions in order to consolidate and institutionalize and legitimize their newfound majority status and resultant power. Al-Sadr has (off-and-on) encouraged outright resistance.
Insofar as the Americans have been able to operate in Iraq with a degree of cooperation, they have Sistani to thank. But, as early as March 2004, al-Sadr’s Badr Brigades rose up against the American occupation.
You might think that the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr would be grateful to America for delivering Saddam Hussein into their hands for execution. You would be wrong.
Calling the United States the “great evil,” powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr on Sunday ordered his militiamen to redouble their effort to oppose American troops and argued that Iraq’s army and police force should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”…
…Sadr’s statement did not explicitly call for an armed struggle against the Americans, but it represented his most forceful condemnation of the U.S.-led occupation since he went underground after the start of an intensified security crackdown in Baghdad nearly two months ago.
“You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don’t walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy,” his statement said.
Sadr urged his followers not to attack fellow Iraqis but to turn their efforts on American forces.
“God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them — not against the sons of Iraq,” the statement said.
The problem that American forces face in Iraq is that the Shi’a majority does not want to cooperate with us while we try to train their army and police. Their religious and political leaders are calling for Iraqis to ‘unify their efforts’ against American troops, not against criminal and violent elements within their society.
The people we liberated are not friends of America. They are not really friends of anyone. They are a new political force…a force not seen in over five hundred years: a Shi’a dominated Iraq. They are simultaneously allies of the Shi’a regime in Tehran, and rivals to the Shi’a seminaries in Qom.
We empowered Shi’a clerics and disempowered whatever pro-Western secular elements that existed in Iraq. We are now fighting to create stability in Iraq…but that stability may not be achievable. And it is definitely not achievable in any short period of time. And, if we are going to be an integral part of creating that stability we have to be able to rely on the good will of the Shi’a community. Clearly, we cannot rely on their good will. They want us to leave. They are going to kill us if we stay.
That is why we should end the occupation immediately and bring our soldiers out of Iraq. We cannot succeed where we are not wanted and where our allies want us dead.