"The (Shi'ite) religious establishment fears the occupation authorities will work to include this law in a new U.N. resolution to give it international legitimacy. ...Sistani's followers said he agreed to the interim constitution to preserve national unity while Iraq remained under occupation. However, he remains sharply critical of several elements of it that would have the effect of diluting Shiite political dominance.
"We warn that any such step will not be acceptable to the majority of Iraqis and will have dangerous consequences."
Ultimately, Sistani's thinking seems to be "We're the majority, so let's have elections, the sooner the better, because we'll win and then everything will be fine." That's a narrow view of democracy - I wonder if the phrase "tyranny of the majority" ever comes up in discussions of Iraq's future political structure - but still one likely to prevail among Shiites.
And that carries tremendous risks. Some commentators downplay those risks; you will hear, for example, that Sunni Muslims might be persuaded that their influence in economic and technical areas would afford them a kind of social power that would provide an adequate counterweight to Shiite political power. Moreover,
"Iraqis are nationalists first, Shia and Sunni second," says Dilip Hiro, London-based author of several books on the Middle East....He doesn't see a Shiite-Sunni war coming soon, he told the Toronto Star - which makes sense from that perspective, since an occupation, de facto if not de jure, appears likely to continue for some time yet.
"So long as there is a foreign occupier, they will remain united."
There are, however, two problems I see with that sort of analysis. One is that while the thinking about what the Sunnis would accept undoubtedly has some validity, it still depends on that sense of unity - and "united" in this context means "united against the US." So the only way, by the very argument, to head off sectarian war in the longer term is by continuing indefinitely the selfsame occupation that has inflamed violence both inside and outside Iraq: the very definition of a Hobson's choice.
More importantly, it ignores - as often happens, it seems - the Kurds. I see no way that they will accept the vision of a single, unified, Shiite-dominated Iraq held by Sistani and, because held by him, held also by his followers, a vision that would require the Kurds to surrender all that they have gained over the last dozen years toward their long-held dream of independence or at minimum autonomy. That is, the biggest risk of ethnic conflict I see is not between Shiites and Sunnis but between Shiites and Kurds, or perhaps even Arabs and Kurds. I wonder if that's part of Sistani's vision.
The big tests are yet to come.
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