U.S.
Planners Surprised By
Strength of Iraqi Shiites
By Glenn
Kessler and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
24 April, 2003
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 was helping to move clerics safely into towns where they could
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
also 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 Iraqi (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