"Unless The White House Abandons Its Fantasies, Civil War Will Consume The Iraqi Nation"

Robert Fisk, 08/30/03

In Iraq, they go for the jugular: two weeks ago, the UN's
top man, yesterday one of the most influential Shia Muslim clerics.
As they used to say in the Lebanese war, if enough people want you dead,
you'll die.

So who wanted Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim dead? Or, more to the
point, who would not care if he died? Well, yes, there's the famous
"Saddam remnants" which the al-Hakim family are already blaming for the
Najaf massacre. He was tortured by Saddam's men and, after al-Hakim had
gone into his Iranian exile, Saddam executed one of his relatives each
year in a vain attempt to get him to come back. Then there's the
Kuwaitis or the Saudis, who certainly don't want his Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to achieve any kind of "Islamic
revolution" north of their border.

There are neo-conservatives aplenty in the United States who would
never have trusted al-Hakim, despite his connections to the Iraqi
Interim Council that the Americans run in Baghdad. Then there's the
Shias.

Only a couple of months ago, I remember listening to al-Hakim
preaching at Friday prayers, demanding an end to the Anglo-American
occupation but speaking of peace and demanding even that women should
join the new Iraqi army. "Don't think we all support this man," a
worshipper said to me.

Al-Hakim also had a bad reputation for shopping his erstwhile Iraqi
colleagues to Iranian intelligence.

Then there's Muqtada Sadr, the young -- and much less learned --
cleric whose martyred father has given him a cloak of heroism among
younger Shias and who has long condemned "collaboration" with the
American occupiers of Iraq; less well-known is his own organisation's
quiet collaboration with Saddam's regime before the Anglo-American
invasion.

Deeper than this singular dispute run the angry rivers of
theological debate in the seminaries of Najaf, which never accepted the
idea of velayat faqi -- theological rule -- espoused by Ayatollah Khomeini
of Iran. Al-Hakim had called Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah
Khamanei, the "living Imam". Al-Hakim also compared himself to the
martyred imams Ali and Hussein, whose family had also been killed during
the first years of Muslim history. This was a trite, even faintly
sacrilegious way of garnering support.

The people of Najaf, for the most part, don't believe in "living
Imams" of this kind. But in the end, the bloodbath at Najaf -- and the
murder of Mohamed al-Hakim -- will be seen for what it is: yet further
proof that the Americans cannot, or will not, control Iraq. General
Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, said only 24 hours earlier
that he needed no more troops. Clearly, he does if he wishes to stop the
appalling violence. For what is happening, in the Sunni heartland around
Baghdad and now in the burgeoning Shia nation to the south, is not just
the back-draft of an invasion or even a growing guerrilla war against
occupation. It is the start of a civil war in Iraq that will consume the
entire nation if its new rulers do not abandon their neo-conservative
fantasies and implore the world to share the future of the country with
them.