WASHINGTON, 24 April 2003 — As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq’s future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.
The burst of Shiite power — as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned trip to Karbala Tuesday — has US 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 Saddam’s government, US 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 Saddam and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.
“It is a complex equation, and the US 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 US 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 Saddam as a bulwark against Iran. But by this year, the drive to topple Saddam — who had suppressed Iraq’s Shiite majority for decades — loomed as a much more important objective for the administration.
US intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was originally thought. On Monday, one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq’s Shiites and the US strategy for containing fundamentalism in Iraq.
The administration hopes the US-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervor for Islamic rule in the same crescent, officials said.
“This is a 25-year-project,’’ one three-star general officer said. “Everyone agreed it was a hugh 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 is helping to move clerics safely into towns where they could build a political base. In Najaf, for instance, agency case officers are working 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 Saddam had executed hundreds of Shiite clerics and exiled thousands more, leaving few Shiite civic or religious leaders of national standing behind. Shortly after Baghdad fell, a London-based Shiite cleric who was working with US forces, Abdul Majid Khoei, 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 the nation’s top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and ordered him to leave the city before tribal elders persuaded them to disperse.
US 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 Shiites of Iraq make up about 60 percent of the population, compared to less than 20 percent for the Sunnis that have long dominated Iraqi political life. Shiite Muslims make up less than 15 percent of the world’s 1 billion Muslims.
While Shiites are the majority in both Iran and Iraq, the Shiites in Iraq are Arab, not Persian, giving US 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 US official said.
Indeed, some experts believe that the end of 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 are in Najaf and Karbala.
Some US intelligence analysts and Iraq experts said they warned the Bush administration before the war about vanquishing Saddam’s government without anything to replace it. But officials said the concerns were either not heard or fell too low on the priority list of postwar planning.
