> On 8/27/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
...
> > Uh-oh, guess they haven't been reading Yoshie!
>
> If separation of church and state is what Iraqis want, they have voted
> for wrong parties.
>
> Iraqis have also voted for wrong parties if they want US and other
> foreign troops out, too.
>
> For either purpose, Iraqis should never have participated in
> US-sponsored elections, which have done nothing except to escalate
> sectarianism.
>
> But it's their country -- let them make their own choice, even
> lethally wrong ones.
Doug's Jihad against Yoshie's deviationism continues apace. I would suggest that we have to be careful about interpreting that result: for one thing, recent news reports suggest that the nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is growing in strength and popular base. The WaPo recently described him as the most popular politician in Iraq: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/23/AR2006082301647.html)
In Ahmed S Hashim's book about the resistance in Iraq, he describes how Sadr is so popular in the Sunni resistance strongholds that posters bearing his image are ubiquitous.
I would suggest, therefore, that the growing opposition to religion in politics is an artefact of the fear about the propensity for religious groups to pursue sectarianism. Sadr is popular because he is a nationalist, and anti-occupation. Although recently released figures show that the bulk of resistance attacks right up until a month ago were directed against occupation troops (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5052138.stm), there is real fear of civil war, directed by the feckless and corrupt SCIRI and the takfiris. It is not an accident in this regard that as the SCIRI becomes increasingly unpopular, Hakim is trying to revive dreams of an autonomous Shi'ite south, something the bulk of Shi'ites have never supported. Since the SCIRI can offer working class Shi'ites literally nothing, because it is an upper-bourgeois exile group with sectarian politics and no real rooting in the base of Iraqi society, they are trying to present their sectarianism as a potential material benefit in terms of a share of the oil etc. The fact that Iraqis are more intensely hostile to the occupation than they have ever been, and that this has spread to the Kurdish north, suggests that those groups who wish to imbricate the church in politics will only be able to do so if they offer it as a pan-Iraqi, pan-Islam movement. So if the Sadrist movement is forced to re-enter the armed resistance on a full-time basis, you might expect a coalition between Sunni nationalist groups and the Mahdi army, with exactly that kind of loosely 'Islamic' nationalism. _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d