"poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia"

Clerics and politicians speak in hushed tones about the names drawn up for assassination. Guards stand outside their compounds clutching assault rifles, and handguns rest on desks. No one can be trusted. All sides fear that dark times are coming to Najaf, the spiritual capital of Iraq's Shiite Muslims. "The situation is mysterious," said Sheik Ali Najafi, the son and confidant of Grand Ayatollah Bashir Hussain Najafi, one of the four senior most Shiite clerics in Iraq, who guide the country's majority faith and counsel its politicians. Like elder statesmen, the four have found themselves ensnared in the conflict between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and an upstart young cleric, son of a revered grand ayatollah: Muqtada Sadr. The poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia has consequences far beyond the alleyways of this ancient shrine city.

Isn’t that the sort of purple passage that the late M. Eduard Sa‘íd of Columbia would classify as orientalisme? "Poisonous atmosphere of treachery and paranoia," for gosh sakes! Though to be sure anybody who lacks ... lemme see, ... who lacks a "grand theory of civil war promotion" [1] is likely to be as much in the dark as thee and me are, Mr. Bones.

The good news is that however literarily deplorable, poisonous atmospheres of intrigue have been able to produce an invasion-language news story about Peaceful Freedumbia not datelined from the International Zone. Mr. Parker of the Los Angeles Times must have actually travelled down to the Bible Belt to have a look first hand. Happily, he follows that woozy incipit up with a caption for wooze-impaired grown-ups:

Najaf may hold the key to Iraq's stability; if it descends into violence, the entire Shiite south will almost certainly follow suit. U.S. forces will be stretched, the chances of a troop drawdown diminished. The Shiite parties involved will probably look to Iran to broker an end to the crisis. And chances for real political process will be on hold.

What could be adultier, higher and drier, than that semicolon after ‘stability’? As political analysis, though, I wonder: the entire Shiite south did not go bananas in 2004 when CIA asset ‘Alláwí took a whack at the Rev. Muqtadae, and I don’t instantly see why it should do so now that poor M. al-Málikí has stepped up to the plate. Perhaps we had better extract what there is of Mr. Parker that rises above the cartoonic and touristic levels:

(...) [A] Salah Obeidi, Sadr's official spokesman ... [said] "We are afraid the situation from now till October won't be stable for the Sadrists" (...) [B] "Muqtada would covet the kind of Shiites Najaf holds," said Vali Nasr "Sadr is popular politically, the grand ayatollahs religiously. There is a tense standoff between them. They both hold power and popularity, and that is what makes the situation so tense and volatile." Najaf's merchant elite and clergy have long viewed Sadr as a rabble rouser, able to mobilize the Shiite slums and rural masses for violence. (...) [C] Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious opinion or edict, that declared the Iraqi government as the only force in the country with the right to bear arms. His son [said] "We see this as a positive improvement. . . . The people want the government to control the streets and the law to be enforced. No other groups." (...) [D] An influential cleric who is knowledgeable about talks between the Sadr movement and the grand ayatollahs described the situation in bleak terms: the government is weak, and Sadr aides now acknowledge privately that they have lost control of members who are receiving support from Iran. "There are groups in the Mahdi Army who are kidnapping, killing and stealing. They don't listen to Muqtada. They are openly operating with Iranian interests. ... In the beginning, it was Arab countries playing a negative role. Now after Qaeda has fallen, it is Iran. Iran wants to control Iraq, and change the hawza from Najaf to Qom." (...)

The Rev. Dr. Influential, who "asked that his name not be used because he feared assassination," is obviously Mr. Parker’s heavy hitter. He possesses a tolerably grand theory of civil war promotion, though Qom v. Najaf is not the sort of civil war that Mu’ámariya Junction gentry and the wider Sunní International are likely to want to burble about much, rigorous nonsectarians that they are. As to the absolute merits, can Mr. Parker have made a mistake about degrees of influentiality amongst the beards and turbans? The strategy that Rev. Influential imputes to the evil Qommies borders on the dotty, [2] although to be sure the Islamic Republic is not the best-run political railroad in the world, and perhaps one of the squid’s tentacles may indeed be playing such a game. [3]

The secondary theme of this pudding (after "Eeek, the evil Qommies must be behind it somewhere!") is that Master Muqtadae and his juvenile delinquents are bad for business. Like him or not, Lord Mammon has a better nose for reality than high-flying First Estate champions do, so there is much more likely to be at least a little something to that.


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[1] The ML-on-ML backbite may be found over in that left column that we never attended to before, unaware that that it is an annotated pornography of Levantine events.


[2] The primâ facie and ẓáhir undotty course would be for the evil Qommies to take over the former Iraq through Hakeems and Supremes. What kind of "control" will they ever have if their preferred instruments are rogue elements of the Muqtadáwiyya?


[3] I should guess, admittedly on the basis of very little, that Mr. Parker overestimates the high-mindedness of the evil Qommies, who do not seem to be any keener to make spiritual conquests than worldly ones. Or to say the same thing bottom-up: can even ‘Alí Cardinal Khamene’í seriously suppose that if the once takes over the Learned Hawza at Noble Najaf, he will have not much trouble with the rest of the former Iraq?

Holy Hibernia comes to mind again, where the Sassenachs expected the R.C. clergy to do much more for them by way of turning Paddy’s superstitions of divinity into quietism and obedience in politics than ever got done. More of M. Sa‘íd's orientalisme that was; it amused the WASP God Folk to exaggerate Paddy’s quaint backwardness.