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.
The combustibility of the situation was heightened with new signs that a Shiite government may put in place a more theocratic regime than the U.S. had hoped. The most recent reflection of that danger was the Governing Council's enactment a week ago of a law requiring the use of Sharia, or Islamic law, for domestic matters such as divorce, child custody and marriage -- a move that would roll back women's rights.
The proposal was framed in a way unacceptable to most Kurds, who are secular, and Sunnis, and the council's vote was largely along religious and ethnic lines.
Although it is unlikely that the Coalition Provisional Authority will agree to the law -- under the terms of the occupation, all laws have to be approved by civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III -- as soon as the U.S. hands over power, it could be enacted.
"Beneath the new interest of the United States in bringing democracy to the Middle East is the central dilemma that the most powerful, popular movements are ones that we are deeply uncomfortable with," said Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Sistani has objected to a Nov. 15 deal with the Governing Council that calls for a transitional assembly, selected by caucuses in May, to elect a provisional government that will assume sovereignty by July 1. General elections would come in late 2005 after the drafting of a constitution.
Sistani and his fellow Shiites fear that unless there are direct elections, the process will be manipulated and they will be deprived of their fair share of power while the Sunnis and secular representatives receive more than their fair share.
The U.S. continues to assert that it will not bow to the Shiite demands for direct elections for the transitional assembly, but the conflict appears to have reached a new level.
Even if the United States could see its way clear to accepting direct elections, it is difficult to see how it could do so without provoking a backlash from the Sunnis and the Kurds, who fear the rising Shiite tide.
Such a scenario could precipitate more serious violence and civil strife than the country has already seen, which would almost certainly derail the U.S. ambition to have a stable transitional government within six months.
The Shiites are thought to make up roughly 60% of Iraq's population. They were brutally repressed under former President Saddam Hussein.
