CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
by GEORGE PACKER

Will moderate Iraqis embrace democracy--or Islamist radicalism?

part two of three

Prayers began beneath a hot noon sun. The shrine itself, with its splendid golden domes and minarets, was closed because of bomb damage. Men filled the square; holding black signs and pictures of Shiite martyrs, and shaking their fists, they chanted, "Pray to Muhammad and the followers of Muhammad and hurry the damning of our enemies. Give victory to Moqtada! We follow Moq-ta-da!" Shaker knelt in the front row and prayed. He seemed alone in the crowd, the only worshipper who wasn't chanting.

One of Moqtada's aides, Hazem al-Araji, delivered the sermon. He is a thirty-five-year-old sayyid with a salt-and-pepper beard who spent two years in exile in Vancouver before the war. Later, in a conversation at his office, he proved to be a smooth, smiling politician who Googles himself several times a day to keep up with his press, and who made a theocratic Islamic state sound not very different from a parliamentary democracy. But, in front of the crowd of worshippers outside the shrine, Araji let loose an incendiary and conspiracy-laced analysis of the violence in Iraq. The attacks came from four sources, he declared, none of them Iraqi or Muslim: it was the Jews, the Americans, the British, and the Wahhabi. The Jews--who had been warned to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11th, so that not one Jew died--"want Iraqis to die." America, the devil, allows the violence in order to have an excuse to continue occupying Iraq. The British, America's partners, are more directly responsible, since they invented Wahhabism and, therefore, Al Qaeda, which have "nothing to do with Islam."

Shaker knelt, slump-shouldered, and gazed down at his clasped hands, muttering prayers. He looked puzzled, as if he were trying to figure something out. I wondered if the cleric's ranting embarrassed him. 

"If you read the modern books of history," Araji proclaimed, "you know that Wahhabism started in 1870 by the good graces of the British government in order to go against Islam, to make Islam look bad, to make Muslims fight each other. Those who know--good. Those who don't--know now."

Araji was referring to "Confessions of a British Spy," an apocryphal memoir attributed to a British colonial officer of the early eighteenth century named Hempher. (Araji was off by a hundred and fifty years.) Going undercover, Hempher befriends a gullible, hotheaded Iraqi in Basra named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and tempts him into founding a heretical sect of Islam that will bring disrepute to other Muslims and turn them against one another: "We, the English people, have to make mischief and arouse schism in all our colonies in order that we may live in welfare and luxury." Hempher cannot conceal his admiration for the spiritual grandeur of Islam, which more than once nearly causes him to abandon his mission. "Confessions of a British Spy" reads like an Anglophobic variation on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; it is probably the labor of a Sunni Muslim author whose intent is to present Muslims as both too holy and too weak to organize anything as destructive as Wahhabism (or, Araji's listeners could deduce, to pull off a crime as appalling as the Ashura bombings, which took place two centuries after Wahhabis, on the same holiday, sacked the Shiite shrine at Karbala, slaughtering two thousand citizens). With its subtext of powerlessness, the "memoir" is ultimately a confession of Muslim humiliation--a text that was bound to find an audience in occupied Iraq, where the name Hempher has begun to circulate among militant Shiites. 

"America, England, Israel, do whatever you have to do, build more missiles, more explosives, more terrorism all over the world," Araji said. "But it's not going to stop us."

The crowd chanted, "Yes, yes to Islam!"

"Just a speech," Shaker scoffed as we drove out of Kadhimiya. "If I knew this man is going to deliver the Friday prayers, I would not go." He would have preferred to hear Moqtada himself. If Moqtada had come, he said, there would have been less talk and more action.

It is one measure of America's inability to achieve its goals in Iraq that a man of "the middle level of mind" like Bashir Shaker--who had everything to gain from the overthrow of Saddam and the opportunities it opened up--feels himself pulled toward a harsher brand of Islam in reaction to the pervasive insecurity of the occupation. Many flaws of the occupation have by now been exhaustively documented: the lack of significant international support at the outset; the catastrophic looting that followed the fall of Baghdad; the commitment of a grossly insufficient number of American troops to provide security, rebuild infrastructure, and fight a widening insurgency; the decisions to abolish the Iraqi Army and purge higher-level Baathists from government jobs, which turned several hundred thousand mostly Sunni Arabs, who might have become partners, into jobless, well-armed, and well-funded potential enemies; the slipshod planning in Washington and political mistakes in Baghdad that have forced the occupation authority to toss out one road map for Iraq's future after another.

Yet perhaps the greatest mistake made by the architects of the war was to assume that their vision of a liberal state would be eagerly embraced by an ethnically divided, overwhelmingly Islamic country with a long history of dictatorship. The Coalition Provisional Authority managed the occupation as if benevolent American intentions guaranteed success. Giving Iraqis a chance to experience and participate in democracy became less important than achieving a desired outcome. As a result, Paul Bremer and his colleagues failed to anticipate the level of resistance that would emanate from Iraq's various factions--in particular, the Shia. 

The C.P.A. has been consistently slow to respond to the simmering frustrations of ordinary Iraqis. Since conditions in Iraq were already unravelling when Bremer arrived, last May, his primary focus has been on establishing his authority. "One thing that the C.P.A. couldn't make a mistake about was showing that it was in control," Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British envoy to Iraq, told me at the end of March, just before returning to London. "This place has to be controlled, and I think this is an area where Bremer has got it exactly right, has shown that he's boss. The Iraqis wanted a boss." But, Greenstock admitted, "we could have been more consultative."

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, who served as a C.P.A. adviser on democracy, put it more bluntly: "There has always been a tension in our occupation between control and legitimacy. And the more we've sought control, the less legitimacy we've had. I think we have erred in general, from the start, much too heavily in the direction of control at the expense of legitimacy, and that has come back to haunt us."

This is a dilemma that Bremer has never been able to resolve. In January and February, he oversaw the drafting of an interim Iraqi constitution by the Governing Council, the Iraqi body appointed by the Coalition. If Bremer had encouraged widespread public discussion of the emerging document's main points, in order to make educated participants of Iraqis, he would have risked seeing the inevitable controversies fought out in the streets. Instead, the interim constitution was written under tremendous time pressure, in small, secretive committee meetings during all-night negotiating sessions inside the Green Zone, the impenetrable fortified area in the center of Baghdad. The signing ceremony, on March 5th, was elaborately planned for the cameras: twenty-five pens were laid out on a table, one for each council member, and a chamber ensemble provided music. At the last minute, however, five Shiite members who had agreed to sign the document ruined Bremer's script by failing to show up. 

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most respected Shiite cleric, had belatedly expressed his opposition to Article 61c of the interim constitution. The article, which soon became notorious, essentially gave Iraq's minority Kurds and Sunnis veto power over any element of the permanent constitution. For the Kurds, who were long oppressed by Iraq's central government, Article 61c was a guarantee of minority rights in a federal republic. In January, Bremer had sent a young and inexperienced team of advisers to negotiate with the senior Kurdish leaders, who refused to back off heavy demands. Even after Bremer personally intervened, the Kurds got almost everything they wanted, including an autonomous region in the north. To the Shiite religious leadership, which apparently learned of the article's language only at the last hour, the same Article 61c appeared to stand in the way of majority rule. 

On March 8th, after three days of persuasion, the five Shiite holdouts on the council signed the document. The interim constitution is a real achievement--the only one the Governing Council can claim. It represents political compromise and a broad consensus about individual rights. During the final day and night of negotiations, Bremer yielded control--a rare moment for an official who has been described as a micromanager--and for eight hours became a silent observer, allowing the Iraqis to work out the unavoidable conflicts between majority rule and minority rights. But, because the C.P.A. and the council had failed to build any support for the interim constitution outside the Green Zone, its unveiling inspired street demonstrations, mass confusion over its contents, and a sharp increase in tension between the Shia and the Kurds. At a meeting of the district council in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood, I listened to Governing Council representatives patiently explaining the interim constitution to a roomful of increasingly agitated citizens who, confronted with a fait accompli, accused the council of dismembering the country. 

Even as it became clear that the key article risked undermining the entire document's legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq's majority, Bremer refused to consider any changes. An official involved in the process said that Bremer wanted the interim constitution to be sold to the Iraqi public in a one-way conversation: "He has a tremendous investment in this as one of his prized accomplishments."

Other than the June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty, the interim constitution is just about all that remains of the November 15th agreement between the C.P.A. and the Governing Council--the agreement that outlined Iraq's political future, replacing Bremer's original plan. Throughout the year of its existence, the C.P.A. has seen its blueprints overrun by events beyond the Green Zone that were to some degree predictable--and were caused partly by its own deep isolation.

One crucial example has been the fate of Moqtada al-Sadr. Last summer, Hume Horan, the C.P.A.'s senior liaison to the Shia religious community, spoke with me about the dilemma posed by Moqtada. On the day after the fall of Baghdad, an American-backed liberal cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, was killed by a mob of Moqtada's followers outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. (Eyewitnesses have said that Moqtada himself refused to save his rival when Khoei was dragged bleeding to his door.) The murder was a power grab by Iraq's most radical Shiite faction. Later, Al Hawza, Moqtada's newspaper, published a blacklist with the names of Iraqi "collaborators," at least one of whom was subsequently killed. As a result, Horan told me, Moqtada's paper could be shut down and he could be arrested. Then again, putting Moqtada in jail might make him a martyr and, therefore, more dangerous. 

During our conversation, Horan sounded as if he were inclined to let the establishment Shiite clerics of Najaf deal with the demagogic young upstart who had planted himself in their midst. "His father would be so distressed if he'd seen his son," Horan said of Moqtada. "Here's this unchurched son of one of the great churchmen, who fills the role without any of the qualifications. What is he lashing out at? Is it his own sense of inadequacy that is being projected?"

Last August, an Iraqi judge issued a warrant charging Moqtada with having ordered the killing of Khoei, but the C.P.A. kept the warrant a secret while it deliberated. One Coalition official said that the C.P.A. prepared to seize Moqtada on two occasions. "The word was 'Lock your doors, bring everybody in. We're going to snatch Moqtada,'" he said. Both operations were abruptly called off. "The decisions had to have occurred somewhere up the Defense Department chain," the official said. (A C.P.A. spokesman said that its plans to capture Moqtada were not that definitive.)

During this same period, the C.P.A. found itself in a series of protracted battles with Ayatollah Sistani, the Shiite leader. The first was over Bremer's decision to have the permanent constitution written by unelected Iraqis. That plan was finally scrapped, in favor of the November 15th agreement, which put the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty ahead of elections and a constitution. Then another dispute arose: Sistani objected to the C.P.A.'s proposal to hold regional caucuses for the selection of Iraq's interim government. Months went by before Bremer, having steadily misjudged Sistani's power, threw out the plan.

While the C.P.A. and Sistani took each other's measure in private, there was no political progress in Iraq. The local and provincial councils set up by the C.P.A.--which should have been seedbeds of Iraq's future leadership, offering the best hope for the emergence of moderate indigenous alternatives to the sectarian parties, with their armed militias and foreign backers--never received the means to exercise real power and show their constituents concrete results. For months, members went unpaid; I was told that a draft of the government order delineating the councils' powers was prepared in October--but it wasn't issued until April 6th. The councils' reconstruction efforts were constantly hindered by bureaucratic clots that kept money from flowing to local military commanders and civil authorities. 

The absence of healthier politics created a dangerous vacuum, which was filled by the most extreme tendencies in Iraq: the Sunni resistance, made up of Baathist, Islamist, and nationalist elements; and the Shiite street politics of Moqtada al-Sadr. Sistani and Moqtada are natural foes, for personal and ideological reasons, and Sistani, because of his immensely greater religious authority, commands a much larger following among Iraqi Shiites. But after Sistani declared his opposition to the interim constitution the balance of power shifted. "As long as the Coalition had Sistani's tacit support, it didn't need to worry too much about Moqtada al-Sadr," Amatzia Baram, an Iraq scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace, in Washington, told me. "But when Sistani announced his objection to the interim constitution the Coalition lost him." Article 61c placed Sistani, who was born in Iran, in a terrible position: he couldn't seem to be selling out Arab interests to the Kurds, nor could he afford to give Shiite radicals the chance to accuse him of selling out Islam. "That was a watershed moment," Baram said. "Because, from now on, every crazy Shiite could claim that he was fighting the Americans in Sistani's name. The moment radicals could present themselves as fighting for Sistani's causes, that united the Shia community against the Americans and the Governing Council. They were using Sistani's slogans against Sistani. Sistani became marginalized in his own name."

Moqtada's amplified significance was lost on Coalition officials. In late March, I asked Greenstock about the size of his following. "Tiny--and with no political impact," he said. "Go around Sadr City again now and you will find fewer Moqtada al-Sadr followers than you would have done five months ago." He added, "We thought he had an opportunity to bubble up and grow--he hasn't done it. Partly because he knows that if he moves anywhere he'll be picked up."

A week later, on March 28th, Bremer ordered the closing of Al Hawza; within days, American soldiers had arrested an aide to Moqtada. Urged on by Moqtada's vitriolic speeches, the Mahdi Army responded with demonstrations that quickly escalated into armed confrontations with Coalition troops in Baghdad and a number of southern cities, several of which fell under the militia's control. The uprising seriously damaged the C.P.A.'s authority and undermined the occupation's legitimacy in the eyes of many Shiites who otherwise have no love for the erratic Moqtada and his violent followers. In early May, after a month of fighting, the Americans acted to end the uprising, confronting the Mahdi Army in Najaf and Karbala.

The timing of the C.P.A.'s move against Al Hawza was baffling, coming in the middle of the mourning period that follows Ashura. A senior official in Washington suggested to me that the Administration had been caught off guard: "Was there a series of decisions that seemed idiotic to those of us back here? Yes. Is one of them that, during a major Muslim holiday, Moqtada al-Sadr is suddenly a persona non grata? Yes." Worse, the C.P.A. seemed not to have prepared for the reaction from Moqtada's militia, betraying a serious miscalculation of the young cleric's strength. The Mahdi Army had been acquiring money and guns since last summer, and continued to intimidate townspeople in Najaf and elsewhere; at one point in January, militiamen occupied the shrine of Imam Ali. 

Amatzia Baram faulted Bremer for the clumsy manner of the March crackdown on Moqtada, but not for the effort itself. As with so many other C.P.A. decisions, he said, "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. That's the main problem in Iraq these days."

Moqtada's newfound power was in part a result of the failed communications effort by the C.P.A. Its Iraqi Media Network has been ineptly run, featuring vapid programming and Coalition-friendly news briefs. The Pentagon, which is in charge of the occupation of Iraq, kept tight control over the flow of news for domestic political reasons. It was a self-defeating effort, however: American propaganda was no match for Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya--and Moqtada's newspaper. 

The C.P.A., having sacrificed legitimacy for control, has ended up with neither. A former Coalition official traced the failures in Baghdad directly back to Washington, and he identified the central irony of the occupation: "A lot of this is the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to rock the boat before the election. And it's laughable that it's pursued this policy. Because of the failure to confront Moqtada, because of the failure to disarm the militias, because of the lack of troops on the ground, Bush may well lose the election."

In March, during the standoff over the interim constitution, I went to see Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurd on the Governing Council. A small man with a large nose and an unblinking stare, Othman was for many years the personal doctor of Mustafa Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas who fought the Iraqi central government. Before the American invasion, Othman was living in London, and, like most Kurdish politicians, he shares the Americans' vision of a relatively secular and liberal Iraq. But, much to the annoyance of the C.P.A., he has proved to be the Governing Council's in-house critic. When most of its other members were jockeying to perpetuate their positions beyond the June 30th transfer of sovereignty, Othman was calling flatly for the council to be dissolved, saying that it hadn't worked. He placed the blame for the debacle over Article 61c squarely on Bremer--who, Othman claimed, had coddled the council's Shiite bloc early on, encouraging its members to become intransigent. "It's a humiliation to him," he told me, with faint satisfaction. "He gave them that leverage, coming and going, and it was very bad."

I asked Othman if the occupation was a failure. "It's not a success, either security-wise or media-wise or economic-wise," he said. "But I can't say it's a failure." He believed that most Iraqis still hoped for a decent life and a better society. In fact, Othman declared, going further than most observers would, "if things are set right, I think liberalism and secularism have the majority in this country always. But are the people now free to express their points of view? They are not. Because the country now is ruled by militias, mullahs, and warlords. The simple citizen is not allowed to have his own rights, to say freely what he wants." In one way, he added, the Americans were like Saddam: "They are not caring much for a simple Iraqi citizen. They care for a chief of a tribe here, a mullah there, a religious man here, a militiaman here, head of a party there."

continue to part three

back to part one