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By Christopher Dickey
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Saddam Hussein had something against bananas and taxed them heavily. You rarely ever saw them for sale when he was in power. Now they're in every outdoor market, even in front of the gold-domed mosque at Khadimiyah, one of the most sacred shrines for Shiite Muslims. Muhammad Abu Zayedine, 38, does a brisk business peddling the fruit to pilgrims. ("They're the taste of freedom," jokes one customer.) Unlike in Saddam's day, Shiite visitors are now allowed to come to Iraq's holy places by the tens of thousands from Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon, from Bahrain and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. So Abu Zayedine is optimistic for himself and his six kids, and grateful to the Americans who've changed his world. "I have no house, but in two years I do hope to own one," he says. "In the past we had no hope."
But the fruit seller is also a realist. "We have more freedom," he said one recent afternoon, "but at any moment you can expect an explosion." He meant that literally: the great Shiite shrine is an obvious target for someone trying to start a sectarian war, and throughout Iraq--throughout the region--fears of just such a confrontation are growing. Sunni Muslim terrorists, who despise the Shiites as apostates, have openly called for their destruction. One of Osama bin Laden's spokesmen urged Iraqis last October to "kill all satanic ayatollahs among the Shiites." As it is, violence is so commonplace in Baghdad these days that it's talked about like the weather. "Terrorist bombs and traffic jams affect my work," said Abu Zayedine.
That mix of fatalism and resolve is typical of Iraqi Shiites, who never deserved the fanatical label imposed on them by Saddam. But collectively, this underclass unleashed and empowered by the U.S. occupation is also the single most revolutionary new force in the region. Guided by their ayatollahs, they can show enormous discipline, whether marching in protest, fighting in the streets--or voting. If they remain grateful to the United States and friendly to its interests, they will be potent allies. If not, the whole adventure in Iraq could come to a disastrous end.
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Indeed, fear of Shiite power was one of the reasons the first President George Bush decided in 1991 that he wouldn't occupy Iraq, wouldn't bring down Saddam and wouldn't even interfere when the dictator slaughtered tens of thousands of Shiites who rebelled. Administration officials concluded then that giving power to Iraqi Shiites would bolster Shiite ayatollahs in neighboring Iran, who'd declared the United States the Great Satan. Shiite strength in Iraq would threaten America's key ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, by encouraging dissent among Shiites in the oil-rich eastern province. Iraqi Shiites might also support the Shiite organization Hizbullah, which was waging a war of attrition against Israel in South Lebanon, and was still holding American hostages in 1991.
Now, clearly, that calculus has changed, and it's left some old allies puzzled. "We do not understand this American business of having friends, then calling them enemies and [calling] the enemies friends," says one influential Saudi prince.
The most obvious reason is September 11, when American officials discovered just how badly they'd misjudged the Saudi and other radical Sunni fundamentalists they had supported for many years. Turning away from those Sunnis made it easier to open up to the Shiites. Bush administration officials now talk about Iraq's Shiites as a vital component of their plans to reorganize and democratize the Middle East. They claim that traditional Shiite Islam, as opposed to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's kind that rules in Iran, has a "thick wall" between mosque and state. One senior administration official goes so far as to say "what Khamenei did in Iran is a detour." There's fervent hope that moderate clerics based in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf will even have the power to put "the Iranian theocracy in complete jeopardy," says the same official.
For the moment, however, those hopes are hanging by a pretty thin thread. In fact, the effort to court Shiite support in Iraq has come down to relations with one man--one 73-year-old ayatollah, Ali Sistani--who refuses even to talk to Americans directly. ("It's two-way communication through intermediaries," an official with the Coalition administration in Baghdad explains.) As the most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, Sistani wields tremendous influence. Because he has told his people not to oppose the American occupation--yet--the Shiite regions of the country have been mostly quiet. ("Sistani has been great," a senior administration official avers.) But because Sistani opposed American plans to pick a provisional government through a complex caucus system, that plan has now been ditched. Indeed, the composition of the government that will receive "sovereignty" when the United States returns it on June 30 is still being discussed and debated.
The basic problem is that, like some of the unhappy alliances Washington's made before in the Muslim world, this one is founded more on convenience than conviction, and the chance for misunderstandings is high. Nothing Sistani has said endorses the vision of Iraq's future laid down last week by Coalition administrator L. Paul Bremer, who warned against confusing the June 30 deadline for a transfer of sovereignty with an actual reduction in the American presence. "There will be thousands of American government officials from all of our major departments still working here," said Bremer. "And there will be... 100,000 American troops and tens of thousands of Coalition forces still here until such time as the Iraqi security forces are able to assure their own security, which will not be as early as July."
Sistani wanted elections last year, but compromised. He wanted them before June 30, but he compromised again. Whether he will endorse Bremer's claim (said to be based on U.N. assessments) that elections may have to wait another year to 15 months is an open question. But what little Sistani has said in public suggests that his vision of democracy and sovereignty may be fundamentally different from Washington's. In an interview last week with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the ayatollah sounded fed up. "It must not take long," he said of the elections. Any more stalling would risk an uprising, he hinted. "The people know how they must act." Having at last tasted freedom on their own terms, Iraq's Shiites are unlikely to settle for anything less.
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