BAGHDAD — The Bush administration has been backed into a corner on its political plan for Iraq by unexpectedly strident opposition from Shiite Muslim clerics, who played their trump card last week, calling on their followers to stage mass demonstrations.
In the next few days, the administration, along with the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council, plans to craft a new plan for choosing a transitional government that is more satisfactory to all the sects and ethnic groups in the country, including the long-suppressed Shiite majority. But there is every indication that no matter what shape it takes, the proposal could be unacceptable to crucial political players.
"The administration is facing problems on all three fronts -- with the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds ... and the situation with the Shiites is looking more and more like a crisis," said Bathsheba Crocker, a fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The picture could get a whole lot uglier."
The bind for the U.S. is that if it accedes to the Shiites' demand for direct elections -- and thus more clout -- it risks alienating Sunni Muslims and Kurds as well as secular Iraqis and women, who would probably have more representation under the current plan calling for caucuses and indirect elections. If the United States sticks to the proposal now on the table, it will face potentially destabilizing Shiite street protests.
The key figure in the Shiite play for power is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who for months restrained the masses from taking a stand against occupation forces, perhaps lulling the Americans into believing that the Shiites would be easy to work with. Shiite-dominated southern Iraq has seen nothing remotely like the violence in the chiefly Sunni central part of the country -- no mines targeting coalition soldiers, no lobbing of rocket grenades, no mortars fired at military bases.
Through last spring and summer, when the coalition had trouble keeping the electricity on and the gas stations pumping, the reclusive cleric with the long salt-and-pepper beard and dark, intense eyes -- giving him a startling resemblance to Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- told his assistant clerics to preach patience to the Shiite streets and to hold in reserve the threat of violence.
Last week, however, his patience appeared to run out. Tens of thousands of his followers poured into the streets to reinforce his call for direct elections, and a cleric close to Sistani threatened strikes and further disturbances.
