Full Release - IRmep

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The Rulemt~e Turbail:
Last September, Paul Wolfolvitz was the special guest at a memorial service in Arlington,
Va.~ for an influential Shiite cleric killed in a car bombing in Najat: Iraq. The deputy
defense secretary hailed Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir ai-Hakim as a Ittrue Iraqi patriot;"
and he quoted from the Gettysburg Address as he likened the slain leader to the Union
soldiers who haq died to preserve their country. It was a eulogy that ai-Hakim undoubtedly
wouid have found jarring. His Islamist political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Re~olution in Iraq, and its 15,OOO-man militia had been funded by Iran, a member gg
President Bush's "axis Pi evil." And ai-Hakim himselfhad long been wary ~perceived
American'imperialism in the Middle East, even as his party, known as SCIRI (pronounced
"SEA-ree") [and otherwise also known in Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SAIRI)], cooperated. with the Coalition Provisional Authority on the.transfer to Iraqi
sovereignty -- the likely reason he was targeted for assassination.
As symbolism goes, the memorial service served to highlight the tangled politics in post­
Saddam Iraq, where idealized notionsM"friend" and "foe" have dissolved into a murJder
reality. Once, Pentagon war planners like Wolfowitz envisioned the toppling ~ Saddam
Hussein with clarity, predicting that the long-suppressed Shiite majority in Iraq would
greet Americans as liberators and that democracy would naturally flower. But clarity has
!Jeen washed away by images ~ charred American bodies swinging from bridges and
naked Iraqi prisoners on dog leashes. Yet to emerge is a clear outline 9i a new Iraq, which
has been tugged in opposite directions by official enemies -- Iran and the United.States -­
that happen to have shared a common interest in Sadda~'s removal. As the largest
mainstream Shiite party, SCIRI is an important player in Iraq's future, but one with an
ambivalent history with the United States. Itwas oneMthe opposition groups that the
United States counted on to help bring down Sad9am.
Yet SCIRI is also a vehicle in which Iran has invested heavily in a bid for influence in
post-Saddam Iraq. And so despiteWolfowi~'s hailing 2fthe slain Ayatollah aI-Hakim as a
kind ~ Shiite Abraham Lincoln, it is far from clear that his Islamist party, which supports
an Iraqi government run according to Islamic principles, will help build the kind ~ secular
democracy that the United States said it hoped to leave behind in Iraq. It is likely that the
new Iraqi constitution will be influenced in some manner by Islamic principles, but it's
anyb04Y's guess whether a sovereign Iraq -- assuming it stays united -- will look more like
a secular Turkey, a cleric-run Iran or something in between.
There are too many competing motives and agendas to predict any outcome with certainty,
no matter what face US policymakers put on it. The blurring ~ Iranian, American and
Iraqi interests came into shm> relief last month when Iraqi and American forces raided the
Baghdad home and offices )ifIraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi on suspicion
that the one-time Pentagon favorite had betrayed US secrets to Iran. It was a c.onfusing
turn ~ events, made even more perplexing by the fact that Chalabi, a Shiite, had worked
openly with Iranians for many y-ears, most prominently-through his contacts withSCIRI,
which was knQwn to be an arm ~ Iranian intelligence. In fact, SCIRI was active in
Chalabi's INC from 1992 through 1996 and was named in the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act,
signed into law by President Clinton, as one ~ the opposition groups that the United States
should work with to topple Saddam. It was thus no secret that Chalabi had, a relationship