December 16, 2004

So now the Iraqi defense minister is the latest to say that Abdel Aziz Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani’s Shiite fascist party is a Trojan Horse for Iran.

The statement from Defense Minister Hazim Shalaan is a stunner, and the fact that he is a chief actor in the puppet U.S. interim government doesn’t take away from the fundamental truth of what he had to say.

Most of today’s papers cover Shalaan’s remarks, but without the prominence they deserve.

The Sistani-backed Shiite party, organized by Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani acolyte, is the "Iranian list," says Shalaan. "Iran is the big link in terrorism in Iraq. … I want to warn you that Iran is the most dangerous enemy to Iraq and to all Arabs. Shahristani went to Iran after 1991 and worked on building an Iranian nuclear reactor. We will not let him come back and become an Iraqi prime minister." He warned that Iran and Sistani want "turbaned clerics to rule."

He is exactly right—and the neoconservatives backing the rise of Shiite fascism in Iraq are to blame.

Incredibly, SCIRI—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdel Aziz Hakim, a semi-ayatollah—is leading the Sistani list, despite its official backing from Iran. And Al Dawa (The Call) is another Shiite fascist party. Its members actually blew up the American embassy in Kuwait in 1983, with Iranian help, and carried out hundreds of assassinations and terrorist acts in Iraq between 1969 and 2003, also backed by Iran. These are the parties that President Bush wants to rule Iraq? Their leaders ought to be arrested for espionage and put on trial for terrorism by the Iraqi authorities. Hopefully, Shalaan will do just that, but Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn’t there yet.

Unraveling all this is too complicated for a blog entry. But the important thing to understand is that the forces in Iran supporting Sistani, Shahristani, Hakim and Al Dawa are a faction of Iranians amenable to collaboration with the United States, Israel and the neocons. They are still (of course) Islamic revolutionaries, but slightly more moderate than the hardest of hardliners in Iran. They are the faction of illusory moderates that Bill Casey, Ollie North and Michael Ledeen courted during Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s, and I believe that Hashemi Rafsanjani—who is now contemplating a run for the presidency of Iran—is one of them. As I reported in yesterday’s entry (see below), this is a Big Mistake by the neocons, who seem to relish making Big Mistakes.

Neocons in Black Turbans
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/neocons_in_black_turbans.ph
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December 15, 2004

Not many neoconservatives are descended from the Prophet Mohammed. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many neocons—and their puppet in the White House—are backing the Iraqi Shiites.

The black turbans, of course, are the Shiites (mostly clergy) who make the spurious claim that they are descended in a direct bloodline from the prophet himself. Now, unless they’ve hired the genealogical whizzes from the Mormons, it’s not likely that they can prove any such thing. But among the credulous faithful, it’s a big deal. One of those who makes that claim is Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Iranian-connected "Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq." You wouldn’t think that anyone whose party calls for "Islamic revolution" would be invited to the White House, but Hakim has cozied up with President Bush himself in the Oval Office. Hakim also loves to snuggle with Iranian ayatollahs, and his paramilitary praetorian guard, the Badr Brigades, were armed and trained since the 1980s by Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard.

Lots to say on this today.

The New York Times has a he-said, she-said page one article on Hakim today, raising some concerns about Hakim and then knocking them down. It’s a horrible article, full of contradictions and with little to none investigative content. (Where, oh where, have the investigative reporters gone?) One glaring contradiction, unremarked on, is that it quotes Ghazi Yawar, the president of Iraq, warning that more than a million people from Iran have crossed the border to vote in the election and than Iranian money and agents are being mobilized to tilt the vote. It then reports: "But American and Iraqi officials say that many of the migrants crossing the largely unmonitored border are Iraqi Shiite families that fled Saddam Hussein’s repression." I would point out that Yawar, the president, is not so sanguine, and he counts as an Iraqi official.

In the Washington Times today, Arnaud de Borchgrave, conservative but no neocon, says that Jordanian intelligence reports that three million Iranians have entered Iraq since 2003.

The New York Times piece goes on to tell readers to relax—that Shiites in Iraq don’t like Iran, that they don’t believe clerics should run the government, and that there are bitter rivalries among them. (Indeed, Hakim’s brother was blown up last year in Iraq.) All true. Yet there is no question that a great Shiite fundamentalist power is arising in Iran, Iraq and surrounding areas, and it’s all happening with American support.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute takes all this on in a piece called: "Will Iran Win the Iraq War?" The heart of Gerecht’s piece is this: That a Shiite power in Iraq will undermine the clergy’s rule in Iran, and is part of a needed Bush administration offensive against the hard-liners in Teheran. Quote: "Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Teheran’s clerical dictatorship."

This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms—instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq’s Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran’s "clerical dictatorship." I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia’s Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It’s a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades.




Brigades of Fury
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/brigades_of_fury.php

December 09, 2004

The Brigades of Fury in Iraq are the vanguard of the Shiite push for civil war. It is a Shiite militia, formed in Basra, that is reportedly building forces in the southern half of Iraq, and which this week engaged in a pitched battle with Sunni forces in the so-called "triangle of death," the nonsensically named area just south of Baghdad.

It isn’t clear who, exactly, is backing this new force, but its purpose is clearly to intimidate the Sunni heartland and to help the U.S. occupation crush the resistance to the neocons’ plans for Iraq. To me, it seems inconceivable that such a force could come into being without at least the tacit support of Ayatollah Sistani, the czar of Shiite Iraq.

Sistani is intent on imposing his will, like most would-be dictators. Hiding under the label of "quietist,"—that is, apolitical—the in fact extremely political Sistani is using his muscle to force all Shiite factions into a unified election list. That "muscle" includes his Svengali-like influence over millions of deluded, fanatical followers chanting "Allahu Akbar!" It’s scary and violent. But not only is the Bush administration unconcerned, but with the neocons pushing it, the White House has established a working alliance with the Sistani right.

Here’s Newsday on the coalition :
( http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/chi-04120803
22dec08,0,7794222.story )

of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Tuesday finalized an electoral coalition that will group all the country's major Shiite political parties, most minor ones and dozens of independents on a single slate.

The coalition's broad reach will put it in a commanding position to gain a sizable percentage of the majority-Shiite vote in Iraq's election scheduled for Jan. 30 and perhaps dominate the National Assembly that will draft a permanent constitution for Iraq.

The coalition will run as the United Iraqi Alliance, though among most Iraqis it already is being referred to simply as "Sistani's list."

Newsday notes that both Muqtada Sadr, the murderous Shiite insurgent, and Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons’ Iraqi darling, will be on the list. Many of the candidates will be Khomeini-style partisans of the rule-by-clergy theory invented by Khomeini in the 1960s and implemented in Iran in 1979.

A Shiite offshoot, which had threatened not to join Sistani’s list, caved in after voicing objections to the prominence of so many clergymen, or mullahs, on the list.

The Shiite Political Council, an umbrella organization of 38 parties, was persuaded to join the coalition after announcing last week that it would withdraw to protest the preponderance of religious hard-liners on the list, said Hussein Musawi, a spokesman for the group.

At the time, Musawi complained that "all the top names on the list are turbaned men who support wilayat al faqih," the theory of governance pioneered by Iran's late leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Wilayat al faqih, roughly translated, means "the mullahs are the bosses." And so it will be in the New Iraq.