U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites
 

I'm sure this isn't exactly breaking news to anybody at this point, but I'm really starting to worry that by ousting Saddam we've only created a void that a bigger, far more dangerous monster will fill.

Time will tell, but I can't say I'm not a little worried.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr22.html

U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites

By Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 23, 2003; Page A01


As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.

The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.

"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."

Complicating matters is that the United States has virtually no diplomatic relationship with Iran, leaving U.S. officials in the dark about the goals and intentions of the government in Tehran. The Iranian government is the patron of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Iraqi Shiite group.

Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, a major strategic goal of the United States has been to contain radical Shiite fundamentalism. In the 1980s, the United States backed Hussein as a bulwark against Iran. But by this year, the drive to topple Hussein -- who had suppressed Iraq's Shiite majority for decades -- loomed as a much more important objective for the administration.

U.S. intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was thought. On Monday, one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq's Shiites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq.

The administration hopes the U.S.-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories and Saudi Arabia. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervor for Islamic rule in the crescent, officials said.

"This is a 25-year project," one three-star general officer said. "Everyone agreed it was a huge risk, and the outcome was not at all clear."

The CIA has cultivated some Shiite clerics, but not many, and not for very long. The CIA is helping to move clerics safely into towns where they can build a political base. In Najaf, for instance, agency case officers worked with a couple of clerics.

"We don't want to allow Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold," a senior administration official said. "We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions of influence."

One major problem is that Hussein executed hundreds of Shiite clerics and exiled thousands more, leaving behind few Shiite civic or religious leaders of national standing.

Shortly after Baghdad fell, Abdul Majid Khoei, a London-based Shiite cleric who was working with U.S. Special Forces, was stabbed to death at a shrine in Najaf, apparently by followers of a young anti-American Shiite leader. They also surrounded the Najaf home of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation's top Shiite cleric, and ordered him to leave the city before tribal elders persuaded them to disperse.

U.S. officials are hoping to combat fundamentalism by helping the Iraqis build a secular education system. Before 1991, Iraq had what was regarded as one of the finest education systems in the region, but years of economic sanctions have devastated it.

"The most radical aspects of Islam are in places with no education at all but the Koran," an official said. "There is no math, no culture. You counter that [fundamentalism] by doing something with the education system."

The Shiites of Iraq make up about 60 percent of the population, compared with less than 20 percent for the Sunnis that have long dominated Iraqi political life. Shiite Muslims, who make up less than 15 percent of the world's 1 billion Muslims, formed their own sect shortly after the death of Muhammad, founder of Islam, in 632.

While Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq, the Shiites in Iraq are Arab, not Persian, giving U.S. officials hope that a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism and a tradition of resisting the concept of a single supreme Shiite ruler will keep Persian fundamentalism in check. "There is a big difference, a tremendous difference, between Persian and Arab Shiites," a U.S. official said.

Indeed, some experts believe ending the suppression of Iraqi Shiites will begin to turn the center of the religion away from Iran. The shrines of two of its most revered imams -- the Shiite successors to Mohammed -- are in Najaf and Karbala.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts and Iraq experts said they warned the Bush administration before the war about vanquishing Hussein's government without having anything to replace it. But officials said the concerns were either not heard or fell too low on the priority list of postwar planning.

Chalabi's influence, particularly with senior policymakers at the Pentagon, helped play down the prospects for trouble, some officials said. "They really did believe he is a Shiite leader," although he had been out of the country for 45 years, a U.S. official said. "They thought, 'We're set, we've got a Shiite -- check the box here.' "

"We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence," said Walter P. "Pat" Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. "In this case, the policy community have absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much."

U.S. officials have tried to make inroads with Iraq's most important Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), starting with contacts in Kuwait about five years ago. A senior representative of SCIRI met with Vice President Cheney in August when U.S. officials gathered leaders of the Iraqi opposition groups in Washington.

But SCIRI, which is based in Tehran and is closely linked with the Iranian government, boycotted the first U.S.-sponsored meeting of Iraqi political and religious leaders in the town of Ur to discuss the country's political future. Over the years, "there was not as much contact as there should have been," the State Department official said.

"They expected a much warmer reception, and as a result it would be unnecessary for them to deal with some of these issues," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a Brookings Institution scholar, who was one of President Bill Clinton's top Iraq specialists. "That flawed assumption is at the heart of some of the reasons they are scrambling now."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

So we install democracy, the majority votes for a shiite extremist, then we come back, bomb the shit out of them until theres a 'regime change', and set up a democracy again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Simple as that.

Like, stop being so negative, yo!

I ain't negative. I just coming around at positive from the backside.

As long as they don't make or acquire WMD, I could care less what these people do after we are out of there.

So all your talk about liberating Iraq from Tyranny was just bullshit then? Wow. Who could have guessed?

EDIT: Fuck, Burbank beat me to it.

For me, it was about the WMD. The freedom deal was just a convinent way to smash you dumbfuck liberals who always whined about how you are for "human rights" and "against facisim".

Wow, Vince, color me surprised. I was totally convinced by your pasionate speech about the 'rape rooms' and the iraqi children who'd watched their parents die. I really believed that in your black little heart you believed that the sufering visited upn them by our bombs was worth it so that one day they might live free.

I have to say I'm shocked to find you couldn't care less. Really, really shocked. Seriously. Who knows what else might have been just a clever stance to 'smash' us 'dumbfuck liberals'?

Next thing you know we'll find out you never had a submarine letter, never tried to get into the army, never studied to be a priest. Who knows what's true with you Vince? You've really lost credability with me. It's almost as if your some kind of pathalogical liar.

Or just a numb tit who says any old moronic thing when he's worked up.

Careful what you say, Vince. There's still no proof of WMD found in Iraq... if none are found, that more or less means this war was just a huge waste of money at the American taxpayers' expense. And if there's one thing that grinds your sack... huh? huh?

Oh no, wait. This war was actually about oil all along. You just said it wasn't to shoot down everybody's bleeding-heart sentiment.

the next person who says this war was about oil we be violently sodomized with a lubeless boomstick.

dammit >:

anyway, i must admit that i did not expect the level of hypocrisy that we have seen from the iraqi people. if they begin establishing training camps and funding terrorism, you can sure as hell bet that we will "lather, rinse, repeat." this damned campaign is getting stickier with each passing day, but i feel that we must see it through. if we don't, it will be like mogadishu all over again.

I've been beating this horse for a while, but here goes again:

The doctrine of pre-emptive "regime change" absolutely, positively needs to account for the post-war scenarios. If the assessment suggests that the country attacked is going to be worse off, both for the citizens of that country AND for the United States, then "regime change" is absolutely, positively unjustifiable. If, however, you are able to show that the citizens and the US will be better off (and empty statements about liberation or destroying the unproven WMD certainly do not count), then the pro-"regime change"'s argument is that much stronger, that much more justifiable morally. Hell, I would even be swayed. Central to the issue is "what government" and "how likely". These questions weren't even asked during the buildup towards war, let alone answered.

A surgeon may not be able to save every patient's life, or account for all possible consequences. BUT, she doesn't go cutting things up without having an idea of what to do, what the side-effects may be, how to minimize the side-effects. AND, if the procedure is too dangerous, knowing to seek alternative avenues of treatment wherever available. We should be past the age when trepanning and bloodletting were deemed acceptable medical procedures.

the bottom line is that both here and in Iraq(not to mention many other countries)

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS A RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALIST ENABLER! >:

i submit a link to democracy now with a Robert Fisk interview.. he says "MY FEELING IS THAT THERE WILL BE A WAR - IT MAY ALREADY HAVE BEGUN - AGAINST THE AMERICANS BY THE IRAQIS"
http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/de...n20030422.html

its really amazing what we have done and how we are spinning it on prime time.. i don't see how the iraqis are going to benefit.
if there arent' more factional wars and people taking advantage of the power vacuum ill be amazed.

how many weapons inspectors said that iraq was 99% wmd free?
most of them?

Saddam for all his faults kept a lot of fundamentalist extreemism at bay.. we have unleashed them now.. i hope the bush administration is made to PAY damnit!

So, ranxer, how will the Bush administration "pay" for anything? An attack on the United States, perhaps? You should really think before you type something out.

i'm thinking of prison time or at least impeachment there bud..

America will be paying for the mistakes of the bush administration for a long time either way >:

Wait a sec, if Vince was just blowing smoke out his ass about caring what happnes to the Iraqi people, what if Bush was too? Oh, God Damn it, I trusted that man! Man, first Vince turns out to be a lieing, souless bag of crap, and now Bush too! That just steams my clams.

I tell you, I couldn't BEAR to live in a world where a Republican president only pretends to care about the citizens he bombs!

I'm going to go sob bitterly in the bathtub now.

:(

Just so you know, I was not being serious. I've never believed that.

What can they do now? I can't say I know what the future brings, but what other than letting the Shiites do what they want? The alternative seems to instate a new dictatorship. Perhaps, instead of trying to start a trend of democracy in Iraq, a trend of Middle-Eastern countries with good diplomatic relations with America can be started.

If we stop them from electing the leadership that they WANT, then we will be tremendous hypocrites. Ronnie and Vince, I am eager to see your bullshit argument that explains why we wouldn't be hypocrites for doing this.

What's a boomstick?

Besides, amigo, you must agree oil was definitely a consideration. I don't think it's mere coincidence the first regime we targeted happened to sit upon one of the world's largest supplies of black gold.

I don't imagine we have any intention of serioulsy encouraging a majority rule style Democracy in the middle east. I think W is the only person in the administration credulous and simple ennough to have believed that for even an instant. Should it ever come up as an issue Chenney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld will take turns showing the President shiny objects to keep him distracted.

Proto, if Iraqis want to be ruled by a Muslim theocracy, then so be it. As long as they do not gather WMD or support terrorists. If it would not have been for those cases, we would have probably never attacked Saddam.

Burbank, if you are so fucking smart, why don't you run for President in 04? Or will you sit around and get your pussy all clenched up when the vast majority of the country loves Bush?

I want to, they won't let me from having a condition of hives. Simple as that.



Seriously, I can't imagine a job I'd like less.


And Vince, as erotic as you may find the idea, I don't have a 'pussy' to 'clench'. Now leave it alone before it blisters.

I hope you didn't spend too much time away from spinning your dradel to make that whitty but vapid retort.

Vince, I will be truly SHOCKED if that's what happens. Absolutely, completely stunned. It will probably turn my fucking hair white. Because there's no WAY we are going to let a fundamentalist Shi'ite Muslim leader take hold of Iraq.

Woah, there Vince! Don't get so excited! There's quite a vast difference between loving someone and voting for them wouldn't you say? I mean, if you feel that sort of manly attraction to Bush, that's your business, but I can't think of a single President in my lifetime that I would say I "loved".

I think you're letting your emotions cloud the issue here. Do you have a shrine to your lovebunny Bush in your apartment perhaps? One that your roommate hopefully won't throw away?