WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The Iraqi people have spoken. But what have they actually said?
The will of a majority of Iraqis was clearly expressed in the impressive turn out for elections to the new Iraqi national assembly Sunday. And, as expected, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance looks set to hold a commanding majority in the new Parliament.
This is exactly what policymakers in the Bush administration had expected and hoped would happen. Their working assumption all along, fueled by endless assurances from Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has been that Iraq's Shiites will prove independent of the Shiite ruling government in neighboring Iran and will be eager and accommodating in retaining U.S. forces in Iraq as their protection and ally against the guerrilla insurgents who continue to wage a relentless war across the country. The administration's assumption has also been that a broadly based majority Shiite government will be able -- and willing -- to take whatever measures are necessary to relentlessly crush the Shiite revolt.
There was a reason John Negroponte was chosen as U.S. ambassador to Iraq while his lifelong friend and close ally Elliott Abrams plays a central role in shaping U.S. policy on Iraq. As staff director on the National Security Council two decades ago, Negroponte played a similar part as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the first Reagan administration when the military government there with U.S. approval -- Abrams again playing a key role back in Washington -- crushed not just suspected communist insurgents but also the Mayan Indian tribes. Scores of thousands were killed.
Would such measures work in Iraq? Could the new Shiite-dominated government prove both willing and able to take them? And even if it does, will it in reality be prepared to take direction from Washington and want U.S. forces to stay in the country?
The answer to all these questions is assumed by U.S. policymakers to be "Yes." But that is far from an automatic given. The situation in Iraq is rife with uncertainties and unknowns. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority has bent over backwards over the past 23 months since the U.S. armed forces toppled President Saddam Hussein to avoid dealing directly with U.S. authorities or to expressly approve America's staying in Iraq.
Even if a government willing to remain America's loyal ally can be put together in Baghdad, will neighboring Iran allow that to happen? If it does, will Iran use maverick and popular Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and his supporters to launch another uprising against what they would then accuse of being a new U.S. puppet government -- this time run by compliant Shiites -- in Baghdad?
If that happened, Iraq would not merely see a Shiite versus Sunni civil war, but a civil war in which Shiites would rise up against Shiites. If that happened, the Islamist extremists who are the backbone of the popular insurgency far more than Saddam's old Baathists would likely rapidly make common cause with Sadr and his supporters.
There are many other weighty questions hanging over the eventual outcome of Iraq's election. So far, the exhausted, overstretched and badly undermanned U.S. military forces in Iraq have failed to provide effective security for officials of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim government. Will the members of the newly appointed government backed by a majority in the National Assembly enjoy better protection?
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her confirmation hearings claimed that some 120,000 Iraqi security forces were now trained and operational. A skeptical Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware disputed this, putting the figure at 14,000. It all depends, of course, how one defines the word "trained."
What is certainly the case is that most, if not all, of the Iraqi forces trained in a rush from scratch over the last two years have so far proven entirely ineffective at even protecting themselves from repeated attacks and massacres at the insurgents' hands, let alone in carrying the fight to them.
Even if the new Shiite-dominated government should prove able to maintain itself in power and make progress with U.S. aid against the insurgency, the effect of this is likely to accelerate the already alarming degree to which America's traditional moderate Arab Sunni allies throughout the Middle East are being alienated.
Sunni-majority Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf oil states are all already looking with alarm at the zeal with which Bush administration policymakers are determined to empower the unpredictable and untested emerging Shiite political forces in Iraq.
Reports are already emerging that Russia is wooing Syria, Iran and even NATO member Turkey, all of whose governments are alarmed by the radical, unpredictable and in their eyes dangerously reckless new direction of U.S. policymaking in the region. Even Saudi Arabia, the nation that above all others in the Middle East funded the mujahedin war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan 20 years ago now enjoys far more stable and predictable relations with Russia than it does with the United States.
But of all the genies of instability and uncertainty unleashed by Sunday's election in Iraq, none is greater than this: For more than a quarter of a century since the 1978-1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Shiite Muslim religious radicalism has been the most powerful, revolutionary and anti-Western force throughout the Middle East. The most serious and lasting military and strategic reverses the Israeli army has ever suffered were not at the hands of any regular Arab army nor in either of the two Palestinian intifadas of 1987-1992 and 2000-2004, but at the hands of the Shiite Hezbollah or Party of God militia in southern Lebanon.
Can a dangerously overstretched and exhausted U.S. armed forces and a Bush administration that has consistently failed to anticipate to this point any of the unintended consequences that have already flowed from its occupation of Iraq succeed in understanding and mastering the forces of Shiite political and eventual military power that they have now released in Iraq? Pentagon policymakers think they can, but almost nobody else does.
