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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (168332)	4/23/2003 12:48:45 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576929

U.S. grows worried as Iraqi Shiites gain clout FUNDAMENTALISM A GROWING CONCERN By Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest Washington Post WASHINGTON -As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country. The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala on Tuesday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein. As the administration plotted to overthrow Saddam's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Saddam and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region. ``It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out,'' a State Department official said. ``I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, `what are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.'' Complicating matters is that the United States has virtually no diplomatic relationship with Iran, leaving U.S. officials in the dark about the goals and intentions of the government in Tehran. The Iranian government is the patron of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Iraqi Shiite group. The Shiites of Iraq make up about 60 percent of the population, compared with less than 20 percent for the Sunnis that have long dominated Iraqi political life. U.S. intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than originally thought. Monday, one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq's Shiites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq. The administration hopes the U.S.-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories and Saudi Arabia. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervor for Islamic rule in the same crescent, officials said. ``This is a 25-year-project,'' one three-star general officer said. ``Everyone agreed it was a hugh risk, and the outcome was not at all clear.'' The CIA has cultivated some Shiite clerics, but not many, and not for very long. The CIA is helping to move clerics safely into towns where they could build a political base. In An-Najaf, for instance, agency case officers are working with a couple of clerics. ``We don't want to allow Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold,'' a senior administration official said. ``We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions of influence.'' One major problem is that Saddam had executed hundreds of Shiite clerics and exiled thousands more, leaving few Shiite civic or religious leaders of national standing behind. U.S. officials also are hoping to combat fundamentalism by helping the Iraqis build a secular education system. ``The most radical aspects of Islam are in places with no education at all but the Koran,'' an official said.