The Contestants in the Sandbox -- Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani

The strongest figure in Iraq today and the man that bears watching closest -- in the rare moments when he chooses to reveal himself -- is Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the foremost of the Shi'a clerics. His predecessor in that position of strength, Saddam Hussein, was as different as it's possible to imagine. Saddam was basically a military and political party man who had a strong secular bent and only paid lip service to Islam.

For almost all Americans Sistani has to be an enigmatic figure, and that is only proper and fitting for an authority in the Islamic religion, since that is a little outside the mainstream of our culture. The comparison to another Islamic religious leader, from yesteryear, next door in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, comes easily, partly because the garb and hair styles uniformly affected by such religious figures gives them a uniformity of appearance, though Ayatollah Khomeini died way back in 1989. But so far Sistani has come across as being less threatening than Khomeini, though his message may well be the same. Sistani is very judicious in his use of language, so careful and subtle, in fact, that it always requires close study to get an inkling of exactly what he is saying, through the barriers of translation and the constant religious references. Or maybe that difficulty in understanding is just my personal shortcoming.

Sistani, by the way, has an unusually interesting website. It can be read in five languages. Click the title of this post.

In thinking about what we can expect from Sistani, it might be good to go back to Saddam and Khomeini and to recall that they were bitter enemies. During the Shah's time, long before the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Khomeini took refuge in Saddam's Iraq and stayed there for years, until Saddam expelled him in 1978 -- in time for the Iranian revolution.

As inconvenient as it is for those who are still constantly trying to justify the invasion of Iraq by linking Saddam, however tenuously, with 9/11, it has to be noted that Saddam incurred a similarly bitter enmity with another man of deep religious convictions, Osama Bin Laden, and for the same reason -- Saddam's secular policies and his refusal to let Iraq get anywhere near being a theocracy.

Ironically, the clearest path ahead that I can see for Iraq is one leading toward a theocracy much like Iran's, with Grand Ayatollah Sistani being, if not the nominal leader, still the background figure occasionally tapping the wheel of the vehicle as it careens across the desert sands, to keep it from hitting the worst of the myriad rocks and fissures.

Is this, then, what Bush and his advisors intended when they invaded Iraq, unbidden? The creation of another theocratic Iran, a country that is firmly on GWBush's "Axis of Evil" list?

I don't think so.

As the religious leader of the Shi'a, who are 60 percent of Iraq's population, Grand Ayatollah Sistani is GWBush's best hope of keeping things relatively quiet during the transition period beginning in a few days, on 30 June 2004, in which Bush can hope to make a quiet general withdrawal from Iraq -- if that is his plan -- though very likely it isn't his plan, given the extensive installations that he is having placed in Iraq, including six military bases. In fact, I can't guess what Bush's plan might be -- that is, one leading to something better than just another Iranian-style theocracy. But then it really isn't his right to have such a plan.

So what is happening here? Is it possible that Bush has struck a secret deal with Sistani and others, all for only one purpose and that is to keep the oil flowing smoothly out of Iraq and westward? Yet, one statement by Sistani has been crystal clear, and that was his unequivocal declaration that the military occupiers can't stay, and surely that must mean that all those U.S. bases must be abandoned, too, unless they're for the ultimate use of others.

As revered and respected as he is, it can't be easy being Grand Ayatollah Sistani as he prepares to head into the next months. He and the other Iraqi leaders will have to contend with many strong forces, each with their own and often opposite agendas. In addition to the bulked-up and holed-up American and other Coalition troops, there will be younger militants in his own sect, especially Muqtada al-Sadr, and there will be the Sunnis, and the Kurds, and the returned exiles, and the Turks, and the Iranians, and the unrepentant Baathists, and the jihadis from outside Iraq, and Iraqi ex-soldiers feeling disenfranchised but still certain that it is their duty, with or without Saddam, to oppose the invaders and their collaborators, and having countless hidden caches of weapons for doing that--

I wonder if even to Grand Ayatollahs sometimes it seems that God's Will isn't that comfortable a companion.