|
Newsweek - February 9, 2007
MPAC Executive Director discusses
America's Shiite-Sunni discord with Newsweek
Shias and Sunnis are closer together
than Catholics and Protestants
By Lorraine Ali
Feb. 8, 2007 - Many rocks have been thrown through the windows of American mosques since the 9/11 attacks, but recent vandalism at predominantly Shiite places of worship in Dearborn, Mich., have some locals looking toward their own community for the culprits. Though no arrests have been made, The New York Times reported earlier this week that most of Dearborn’s Iraqi Shiite community blame the Sunni Muslims for the broken windows at three local mosques. These incidents were enough to generate at least one large Sunday story that focused on the potential for Sunni/Shiite violence in the United States. Historically, Sunni and Shiite Muslims are split on their beliefs about the rightful successors of the Prophet Mohammed. The Sunnis consider the first four caliphs and their descendents as the true leaders of Islam. Shiites believe that the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are Mohammed’s rightful successors. But like the Catholics and Protestants, they’ve lived side by side in the United States for a century now with little or no problems. There are now an estimated 6 million Muslims in America, most of whom are Sunni (Shiites only make up 15 percent of the 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide). Could the sectarian tension that now divides Iraq, and is threatening to rip apart Lebanon, permeate America’s Muslim communities? NEWSWEEK’s Lorraine Ali spoke with Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of Southern California’s Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), about what’s really happening between America’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Do you think it’s possible that the violence we see between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq could boil over into America’s Muslim communities?
Salam Al-Marayati: I think it’s safe to say we won’t see the kind of sectarian problems you see in the Middle East manifest themselves here in the United States. I don’t see the same kind of fissures opening up here in the States, and there’ve been no specific instances that I know of.
Why do you believe that U.S. Muslims will not experience the same divide?
I’ll give you an example. I was raised here in an Islamic Center [encompassing religious education and worship] that taught Sunni and Shiites. We were closer together than Catholics and Protestants. We read from the same Qur’an, practiced the same five pillars. The divisions are political and historical and for all intents and purposes not relevant to society today. Schools of thought are considered a personal choice, a family decision and don’t play a significant role in the everyday life of the American Muslim. You can be Shiite, you can be Sunni or you can be non-denominational—which I think is really the Qur’anic way—to say really there should not be that division and you’re just a Muslim.
That’s the ideal, but how are Muslims around you grappling with the horrible violence committed by both sides in Iraq right now?
There are discussions, debates, and sometimes they’re heated.
What seems to cause the most tension in these debates?
If you live your life like you’re still living in the Middle East there’s going to be tension. It’s very depressing to witness the suffering in Iraq on a daily basis. It’s traumatizing. But to let that determine or shape how you look at other Muslims, I think that means they haven’t really made that determination to live over here. If you’ve declared America is your home and you’re working toward the betterment of your children and your children’s children, then there’s no reason you would judge other Muslims based on the events in another country.
What about the idea that “If it can happen there, in Iraq, it can also happen here in America.”
American Muslim life is very different. We are much more integrated into the mainstream life. We have more political freedoms. As a whole, Muslims in America live in a free society. We don’t have those same problems that you would find in other parts of the world. Even if you look at Iraq, it’s very different from Lebanon, Egypt, the gulf, so many other parts of the world that have a Shiite minority. It’s the politics there, the reality on the ground, that creates that tension.
Do you believe that the violence in Iraq is really motivated by religious tensions between Sunni and Shiite, or are there other factors there we can’t see?
Some people may call it sectarian violence there, but I look at it more as gang violence. The basic framework of society has broken down. Most Iraqis will tell you they don’t even know where this violence is coming from. People who’ve recently come from Iraq—Iraqis—it’s still a mystery to them. To say it’s the Shiites against the Sunnis is very simplistic view of Iraq. I think that’s part of it, but that’s not the complete picture.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17055260/site/newsweek/
IPS – February 6, 2007
How Neocon Shiite strategy led to sectarian war
Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Feb 6, 2007 (IPS) - The supreme irony of President George W. Bush's campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.
The U.S. policy decisions that led to the sectarian war can be traced back to the conviction of a group of right-wing zealots with close ties to Israel's Likud Party that overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would not destabilise the region, because Iraqi Shiites would be allies of the United States and Israel against Iran.
The idea that Iraqi Shiites could be used to advance U.S. power interests in the Middle East was part of a broader right-wing strategy for joint U.S.-Israeli "rollback" of Israel's enemies. In 1996, a task force at the right-wing Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, under Richard Perle advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that such a strategy should begin by taking control of Iraq and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.
Three years later, the former director of that think tank, David Wurmser, who had migrated to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, spelled out how the United States could use Iraqi Shiites to support that strategy in "Tyranny's Ally". Wurmser sought to refute the realist argument that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would destroy the balance of power between Sunni-controlled Iraq and Shiite Iran on which regional stability depended.
Wurmser proposed replacing the existing "dual containment" policy toward Iran and Iraq with what he called "dual rollback". He did not deny that taking down Hussein's regime would "generate upheaval in Iraq", but he welcomed that prospect, which would "offer the oppressed, majority Shiites of that country an opportunity to enhance their power and prestige."
Whereas the "realists" had assumed the Iraqi Shiites would be "Iran's fifth column", Wurmser argued that the Iraqi Shiite clerics would "present a challenge to Iran's influence and revolution." He cited their rejection of the central concept of the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini -- the "rule of the jurisprudent" -- justifying clerical rule.
From that fact, Wurmser leaped to the conclusion that Iraqi Shiites would be an ally of the United States in promoting a "regional rollback of Shiite fundamentalism". Wurmser even suggested that Iraqi Shiites could help pry Lebanese Shiites, with whom they had enjoyed close ties historically, away from the influence of Hezbollah and Iran.
Wurmser was close to the key officials in the Pentagon and the White House who were planning the invasion of Iraq: Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith. After 9/11 it was Wurmser who set up the now-infamous "Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group" in Feith's office to produce the evidence that could be used to justify invading Iraq. After the U.S. occupation, he became Vice President Cheney's Middle East adviser.
The neoconservative plan for invading Iraq reflected Wurmser's assumption that the United States would not need to plan a long military occupation of Iraq, because toppling Hussein's regime would unleash the power of the Iraqi Shiites.
But the political realities in Iraq were nothing like Wurmser and his allies imagined them. They had not counted on the Sunnis mounting an effective resistance instead of rolling over. Nor had they anticipated that Shiite clerics of Iraq would demand national elections and throw their support behind the militant Shiite parties, SCIRI and Dawa, which had returned from exile in Iran in the wake of the U.S. overthrow of Hussein.
SCIRI and Dawa were not what the hardliners had in mind when they thought about Shiite power in Iraq. Their paramilitary formations had been created, trained and nurtured by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and their views on international politics were not known to be distinguishable from those of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The neoconservatives also knew that the Dawa Party was a terrorist organisation. Its operatives were behind the bombing of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983 in an effort to drive the U.S. out of the country. (One of the Shiites elected to the Iraqi parliament in December 2005, Jamal Jaafar Mohammed, was said by the U.S. Embassy spokesman Tuesday to be under investigation for his participation in that bombing.)
When Ahmed Chalabi's U.S. enemies accused the neoconservative favourite of having spied for Iran, and the National Security Council wrote a policy paper called "marginalising Chalabi," the neocons outside the government were livid. Michael Ledeen wrote a column in the National Review Online May 28, 2004 pointing out that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, and Ibrahim Jaffari of the Dawa were still on the Iranian payroll, but were nevertheless "in our good graces".
Meanwhile, the AEI's Michael Rubin began warning in spring 2004 that Iran was consolidating its influence in Shiite southern Iraq by funneling large amounts of money into support for their Iraqi clients.
But Wolfowitz, Feith and Wurmser, faced with a rising tide of Sunni armed resistance, had already decided that they had to accept the pro-Iranian groups as temporary allies against the Sunnis. When Wolfowitz testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 18, 2004, he suggested that the administration had accepted the continued existence of these Shiite militias, as long as they remained friendly to the United States.
As for disarming them, he said, "That is not part of the mission unless it is necessary to bring them under control." Once the United States had been able to build an "alternative security institution," he said, "then the militias can go away."
The war planners in the Bush administration had also decided that the militant Shiites would get their election in January 2005, which meant that a Shiite government would be formed later that year. With those decisions, the descent of Iraq into sectarian civil war became unavoidable.
Throughout 2004 and the first half of 2005, the Shiite militias took advantage of the supportive policy of the United States to consolidate their power in Baghdad and began terrorising Sunni communities. After the government formed under the Dawa Party's Ibrahim Jaffari, the Shiite Badr Brigade moved into the Ministry of Interior, which became a vehicle for state terror. Despite media coverage of Shiite death squads operating freely in the capital, the Bush administration refused to admit that there was any problem with Shiite militias.
Only in October 2005, after what must have been a fierce internal struggle in Washington, did the U.S. Embassy began to oppose the Shiite effort to force Sunnis out of the capital. By then it was far too late. The genie of sectarian civil war could not be put back in the bottle.
[Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.]
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36461
|
|
