BLOWBACK:

Iraqi Campaign Raises Question of Iran's Sway (JOHN F. BURNS and ROBERT F. WORTH, Dec. 15, 2004, NY Times)

On a list of 228 candidates submitted by a powerful Shiite-led political alliance to Iraq's electoral commission last week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name was entered as No. 1. It was the clearest indication yet that in the Jan. 30 election, with Iraq's Shiite majority likely to heavily outnumber Sunni voters, Mr. Hakim may emerge as the country's most powerful political figure.

Mr. Hakim, in his early 50's, is a pre-eminent example of a class of Iraqi Shiite leaders with close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs. He spent nearly a quarter of a century in exile in Iran. His political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran, and its military wing fought alongside Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war. American intelligence officials say he had close ties with Iran's secret services.

For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in Iraq. [...]

[W]eighing against the prospect of an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq is that Iraqi clerics, unlike the ayatollahs who dominate the government in Iran, mostly belong to the "quietist" school of Islam that holds that clerics should not hold political power directly. A forceful exponent of that view has been Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq - an Iranian by birth - who used his pervasive influence to push rival religious groups together in the political alliance Mr. Hakim now leads.

In his rare interviews, Mr. Hakim has also spoken out against clerics filling government posts, saying that they should project their influence from the mosques, not ministries.

According to rivals of Mr. Hakim within the Shiite alliance, the close ties he forged with Iran's ruling clerics during his exile have been maintained since he and others in the Supreme Council returned to Iraq after Mr. Hussein's overthrow. Those sources say that Mr. Hakim's group and other parties in the alliance, including Dawa, are receiving political advice and financing from Teheran. American officials say that Iran, or at least powerful agencies controlled by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, have backed a wide array of parties, militias and charitable groups that act as fronts for political activities here.

Mr. Hakim has said that his party is respectful of Iran, but independent of it. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine before the American-led invasion of Iraq, he said the group's forces "will never be used as a tool of any foreign power."

In addition, Iraqi and American officials say, the ethnic and cultural divisions that have carved deep historical fissures between Iran and Iraq militate against Iraq becoming a client state of Iran. Since Arab warriors conquered much of the Middle East 1,200 years ago, the land that is now Iraq has served as an Arab frontier. Iraq's Shiites, overwhelmingly Arabs, the officials say, have always formed a crucial part of the Arab world's front-line defenses against Persian ambitions, most recently when tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites fought in Iraq's armed forces during the war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. [...]

American and Iraqi officials said polls commissioned by the American occupation authority, and more recently by the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown that ordinary Iraqis, including Shiites, are deeply suspicious of Iran's religious leadership and strongly averse to a government dominated by religious figures.

"Groups too closely associated with Iran may well suffer," said one American official in Baghdad who has long experience in the region. In fact, the new Shiite alliance almost fell apart last week when some members complained about the prominence of groups with links to Iran.

Still, many Iraqis are beginning to accept that men like Mr. Hakim are likely to play a determining role in the country's future. Although he often wears a cleric's cloak and a black turban signifying the family's claim to be directly descended from the Prophet Mohammed, Mr. Hakim is not formally a cleric, and in this and other ways he remains a mysterious figure. Of all the major political figures competing in the January elections, he is probably the most reclusive, avoiding all but the rarest encounters with reporters, and speaking, mainly, through aides.

Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq, coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to Sunni-ruled states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the officials say, carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among long-suppressed Shiite populations.

"What they are really voicing is their angst over the transition from a Sunni-led state to a Shiite-led state," one Bush administration official involved with policy toward Iraq said after the remarks by Mr. Yawar and King Abdullah. "That touches emotional, religious and historic chords and signifies changes that they don't like. It's a big emotional hurdle for the Sunnis in the region to accept."

The reality is that a democratic Iraq is likely a greater danger to the Iranian Mullahcracy than vice versa.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2004 2:44 PM