In Iraq, America gets the opposite of its wish


HAROON SIDDIQUI

The United Nations is about to save the Americans from themselves in Iraq.

In doing so, ironically and most embarrassingly, at the same time as revelations that Britain and America spied on the U.N. secretary-general and U.N. diplomats in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

So hell-bent were President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to go to war that they were not only misleading the world by exaggerating Saddam Hussein's threat, they were also stooping to snooping on the United Nations for any scraps of intelligence to help line up enough votes to authorize war or, failing that, to discredit and ignore the world body, which is what they did in the end.

Yet here we are, less than a year later, watching these two apostles of unilateralism turn to the U.N. to help extricate them from a mess of their own making.

This near-miraculous turn of events is attributable to a combination of continuing chaos in Iraq and the advent of the presidential election in the United States, on the one hand, and on the other, the moral authority of an aging ayatollah in Iraq and the high priest of the U.N. in New York, Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Call it the triumph of democracy and decency.

Bush got caught between his electoral need to stick to the announced timetable of handing over nominal sovereignty to Iraqis by June 30 and the convergence of Iraqi political resistance on the reluctant personage of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Annan has just agreed to lend U.N. expertise and credibility to the painful process of Iraqi transition to democracy. And Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric who no longer trusts the U.S., has given his blessings to the U.N. mission.

This happy confluence has doomed several self-serving American proposals.

The idea of holding American-style caucuses to install a pliant interim Iraqi regime is finished.

The plan to postpone direct elections until nearly the end of 2005 stands discredited.

The attempt to have a U.S.-supervised interim constitution serve as the guiding document for the next crucial months is in jeopardy.

Whatever the rough draft ends up declaring, its legitimacy will be in doubt. Sistani's insistence that only an elected body draft a constitution has garnered wide support.

Most importantly, what's also up in the air is Washington's hope of having an interim administration rubberstamp, by March 31, continuing American military presence in Iraq.

Again, Sistani's demand that such a momentous decision can be made only by elected representatives has found resonance among all religious, ethnic and tribal segments of Iraq's 25 million population.

American generals are already talking about moving troops out of the big cities into camps, not unlike the hidden 1991-2003 American military presence in Saudi Arabia in a desert.

So complete is Sistani's hold that many members of the American-appointed Governing Council have been trooping up to his house to bask in reflected glory.

The council's two most pro-American members, Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Alawi, puppets of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, respectively, have the least credibility among Iraqis. And the colonial notion, floated by academic Bernard Lewis and other pro-Bush apologists, of re-establishing the monarchy by importing the pliant Prince Hassan of Jordan, has been laughed off the stage.

It is a measure of U.S. incompetence, or cultural ignorance, or both, that the Americans have managed, as usual, to achieve the exact opposite of what they had intended: Weaken the secularists and empower the clerics.

That may or may not be a tragedy, depending on your point of view. But there's no question that this is not what the U.S. had set out to achieve.

Meanwhile, Annan has moved dexterously to insert the U.N. into the process. While agreeing with the U.S. that elections cannot be held before June, as demanded by Sistani, Annan is setting the stage to ease the Americans out as much as possible.

He has said Iraqis themselves ought to decide who takes over July 1. Dozens of ideas are being floated, including expanding the 25-member Governing Council to 50 or even 100 members, or holding an Iraqi version of the Afghan loya jirga, a conclave of representatives from Iraq's various religious, ethnic and other groups.

Annan has suggested an independent election commission prepare for and supervise an election.

The U.N. would, of course, help — provided it is given a clear mandate by the Security Council, something the U.S. sabotaged last year.

Sistani is echoing Annan, but with his own caveats.

Postpone the vote? Sure. But hold it by Dec. 31, and guarantee the date through a Security Council resolution "so that Iraqis will be sure that there is no more postponement and prolonging."

A caretaker government until then? Fine. But confine it to routine administration and don't let it decide on either the constitution or the future role of America in Iraq.

This is as precise a negotiating technique as any of the world's most seasoned practitioners of realpolitik could muster.

Sistani has by no means provided all the answers to some of the more profound questions facing Iraq, such as the balance between Islam and secularism, between the needed democratic assertion of the majority Shiites and the safeguarding of the rights of all minorities.

But this 74-year-old man of few words, and fewer worldly possessions, has so far managed to outwit and outmanoeuvre the bombastic Bush, wielder of the mightiest military machine in history.

A good thing, too, given the president's record in squandering American credibility.


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E-mail:  hsiddiq@thestar.ca