Throngs of Shiites in Karbala surprised U.S. officials and made them reconsider their plans

WASHINGTON, April 23 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Surprised by Iraqi Shiites' influence and strength, U.S. administration officials said Wednesday, April 23, that they were unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American Islamic government in post-Saddam Iraq, a leading U.S. paper reported.  

"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out. The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein," The Washington Post quoted a State Department official as saying.  

The burst of Shiite power - as demonstrated by some two million "pilgrims" to Karbala – has made the Bush administration come to the fact that they failed to appreciate the leverage wield by the Shiites, voicing their concern that they might be not able to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.  

"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 Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the country," the Post wrote.  

"They really did believe he is a Shiite leader," although he had been out of the country for 45 years, a U.S. official said. "They thought, 'We're set, we've got a Shiite - check the box here.' "  

"We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence," said Walter P. Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle Eastern affairs.  

"In this case, the policy community have absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much."  

U.S. intelligence said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was thought. On 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.  

Iran Adds Insult To Injury  

Complicating matters, the daily added, 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.  

It slipped the U.S. mind that the Iranian government is the patron of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Iraqi Shiite group.  

"Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, a major strategic goal of the United States has been to contain radical Shiite fundamentalism," U.S. officials told the Post.  

"In the 1980s, the United States backed Hussein as a bulwark against Iran. But by this year, the drive to topple Hussein - who had suppressed Iraq's Shiite majority for decades - loomed as a much more important objective for the administration."  

"We don't want to allow Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold," another senior administration official said. "We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions of influence."  

The Post also said the assassination of the pro-U.S. Shiite leader Abdul Majid Khoei, who was stabbed to death by some anti-American Shiites in An-Najaf, is a case in point.   

Anti-American Shiites, in addition, surrounded the Najaf home of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation's top Shiite cleric accused by some Shiites of toeing the American line, and ordered him to leave the city, but tribal elders persuaded them to disperse.  

Some experts believe ending the suppression of Iraqi Shiites will begin to turn the center of the religion away from Iran given that the shrines of two of its most revered imams are in Najaf and Karbala.  

Secular Education System  

The mass-circulation daily also said U.S. officials are planning to build a secular education system in Iraq to put out any religious zeal that could, if not would, force them out of Iraq someday.  

"The most radical aspects of Islam are in places with no education at all but the Koran," an official said.  

"There is no math, no culture. You counter that [fundamentalism] by doing something with the education system."  

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.  

While Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq, the Shiites in Iraq are Arab, not Persian, giving U.S. officials hope that a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism and a tradition of resisting the concept of a single supreme Shiite ruler will keep Persian fundamentalism in check.  

"There is a big difference, a tremendous difference, between Persian and Arab Shiites," a U.S. official said.

U.S. officials have tried to make inroads with Iraq's most important Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), starting with contacts in Kuwait about five years ago. 

 But SCIRI, which is based in Tehran and is closely linked with the Iranian government, boycotted the first U.S.-sponsored meeting of Iraqi political and religious leaders to discuss the country's political future.