Doug, you know nothing about Iran, and you know nothing about Iraq either.
If a national liberation front of the sort that I explained in the "Sistani, Elections, and Sectarianism" thread comes about at all, it will happen in large part due to Moktada al-Sadr's initiative,* for he has a genuine popular base among the Shi'i working class, alone among the Shi'is leaders of Iraq, and he's not Persian, a big bonus point, and yet knows how to make friends with Tehran. Sadr has to sell Tehran on his idea, so Tehran will either drop SCIRI and Badr or compel them to sign on to it (the former is better than the latter); or better yet, Sadr will get more popular among Shi'is and relegate SCIRI and Badr to irrelevance.
* <blockquote>As part of his effort to influence the political forces in Iraq prior to the forthcoming parliamentary election, at the end of November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters distribute the draft of a "Pact of Honor," and called on Iraqi parties to discuss and collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before the election.
This conference was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad). Despite extensive search, I found it only reported in a relatively short article in today's Al-Hayat and in dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is legitimate ground to suspect that this media blackout has political significance; indeed most initiatives by the Sadrist current are hardly reported by the dominant media, even when they consist of important mass demonstrations (like those organized yesterday in Southern Iraq against British troops).
In the case of the recent conference, the vast array of forces that were represented and that signed the "Pact of Honor" is in itself already worthy of attention. Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly represented by their MPs, those represented and who signed the document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari's personal representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his traveling outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major Sunni electoral alliance in the forthcoming election), to name but the most prominent of a long list of organizations, along with several tribal chiefs, unions and other social associations, members of the De-Ba'athification Committee and a few government officials. Ahmad Chalabi -- who definitely deserves to be called "The Transformer" -- attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group. It seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as its name is not mentioned in any of the two sources.
According to the reports, the "Pact of Honor" that was adopted consists of 14 points, among which the following demands and agreements are the most important (the sentences in quotation marks are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):
· "withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their withdrawal from Iraq"; "elimination of all the consequences of their presence, including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within a defined schedule";
· suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand coming with the condemnation of their practices against civilians and their breach of human rights;
· categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;
· "resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance"; "we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian reasons";
· "to activate the de-Ba'athification law and to consider that the Ba'ath party is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it brought on the oppressed sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein and the pillars of his regime";
· "to postpone the implementation of the disputed principle of federalism and to respect the people's opinion about it."
The conference established a committee that is responsible for following up the implementation of the resolutions and reporting on it after six months.
If anything, the conference was a testimony to the increasing importance of the Sadrist current. As for the actual implementation of its resolutions, it will greatly depend on the pressure that the same current will be able to exert after the forthcoming election, if the United Iraqi Alliance -- of which the Sadrists are a major pillar on a par with SCIRI -- succeeds in getting a commanding position in the next National Assembly. (Gilbert Achcar, "A Pan-Iraqi Pact on Muqtada Al-Sadr's Initiative," December 9, 2005, r<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9297></blockquote>
The pact is not good enough -- emphasis on de-Ba'athification law severely limits the pact's relevance for Sunnis -- but if Sadr learns to overcome his sectarianism concerning Ba'athists (since many joined the party for jobs or under duress), he can get to play the role that Nasrallah does in Lebanon.
Here's another interesting note on the struggle between Sadr and SCIRI:
<blockquote>The other major contest took place within the UIA itself, pitting against one another the two major blocs: the SCIRI and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. The SCIRI wanted the premiership for their own man, Adel Abdel- Mahdi, an ex-Maoist turned fundamentalist in both Islamic and neoliberal religions. Despite the fact that the SCIRI is the closest of all Iraqi groups to Iran and despite its advocacy of a super-federal state in southern Iraq, an idea that is resented by the United States (and rejected by all other Arab Iraqi forces, including Muqtada al-Sadr's followers), Washington backed Abdel-Mahdi, hoping that he would help the United States lay its hands on Iraq's oil in the name of free marketeering. Khalilzad, chiefly obsessed with reducing Muqtada al-Sadr's clout, was also trying in this way to fan the dissension within the UIA. For his part, Sadr strongly backed his friend and leader of the Dawa Party, Jaafari, whom he deemed closer to his political stance (Jaafari had subscribed without reservation to the "Pact of Honor" that Sadr tried to get all major Iraqi forces independent of Washington to sign [1]) and more open to his pressure.
Tension might have arisen between the two factions, but Tehran -- which invited Muqtada al-Sadr for a visit after the December election -- was certainly instrumental in preventing the UIA from splitting and urging the SCIRI to consider the UIA's unity as a priority. The issue of the UIA's candidate for premiership was thus decided democratically by a vote within the alliance, which gave a narrow majority to Jaafari. Washington's "democracy promoters" did their best thereafter to prevent the constitutional mechanism from getting under way: Normally, the Assembly would have convened and elected among others a president who would have been required to designate the candidate put forward by the largest bloc in parliament -- Jaafari, in this case -- to try to form a government. This position would have enabled Jaafari to maneuver between the other blocs and try to win over enough Arab Sunni representatives to secure a parliamentary majority, thus forcing the Kurdish Alliance to join lest they be excluded from the government.
Obviously, such a scenario was out of the question for Washington: The result was a very tense and highly dangerous standoff, until a compromise was reached whereby Jaafari agreed to be replaced with his second-in-command in the Dawa Party, Nouri al-Maliki. The latter was presented as being less sympathetic to Iran and more flexible and amenable than Jaafari. As a matter of fact, Maliki seems more compliant than Jaafari in his relations with the United States. ("Epilogue," Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, edited with a Preface by Stephen R. Shalom, Paradigm Publishers, 2006, <http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/achcar-guest-editorial-situation-in.html>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>