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

To: Taro who wrote (247749)	8/27/2005 11:57:01 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1572507

No. Nathan Gardels: Iraq's Democratic Stinger Nathan Gardels Thu Aug 25, 4:54 PM ET As the constitutional process unfolds in Iraq and exposes the raw power of the Shiite majority, it is becoming clear that the real damage the Bush Administration has done to US national security is not so much a result of the deception and dissembling over mass destruction weapons as the result of strategic naivete. A year and a half ago I had a "background" lunch in Davos, Switzerland with the most senior administration official who is not the president. I asked him how it could be in the US national interest if an illiberal regime, dominated by the conservative Islamic views of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and sympathetic to Iran, came to power through democratic elections, as it inevitably would because the Shia are the majority in Iraq. He shifted his stocky body in my direction, curled up his lip and cocked his bald head in that dismissive way. He professed confusion at my question, giving the impression that he had not given much thought to this matter or that the question was somehow irrelevant to the real issues. Though there might be disagreement on small things, how, with democracy, he responded incredulously, could our interests and those of the Iraqi majority not coincide? That assumption, like all the others in this war, is fast unravelling. Though more of a compact among the Kurds, Shia and Sunni for the future shaping of Iraq than a constitution set in concrete, it is clear that the main Shia drafters of the present document want Shari'a, the Islamic code, to supplant civil law, especially when it comes to the rights of women and other personal freedoms. Whether or not they can obtain that for all of Iraq, in any case it will apply in the Shiite south. They also insist on a loose federalism for the south that would go a long way toward realizing King Abdullah of Jordan's fear of a destabilizing "Shiite crescent" stretching to Tehran. In this context, it is no surprise that the greatest enthusiasts for democracy in Iraq I've found anywhere have been the leaders of the Iranian regime. At a dinner earlier this year, also in Davos, Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazzi and Vice-President Masoumeh Ebtekar (the spokeswoman for the embassy hostage-takers in 1979) could barely contain their excitement over the prospect of a Shiite majority emerging in the (then forthcoming ) elections. Their fervor in support of democracy in Iraq was only matched by their bold insistence on Iran's right to process nuclear fuel, the final step before crossing over the nuclear threshold to make a bomb -- something supported by Iranians across the political spectrum. And, thanks to the recent Iranian elections, these so-called moderates have now been replaced by a stunningly hardline government. The complicated Iraqi political process is not over yet. Some hope for moderation. But the writing on the wall gets clearer every day, clear enough to worry that America's push for democracy in Iraq may one day be turned against it just like those stinger missiles it once provided to the Afghan freedom fighters.