I Call the President Imam Bush
By Stephen Schwartz
December 22, 2004

If one were to rely on the mainstream Western media, one would assume

the situation in Iraq represents nothing more than a disaster and a

error by the United States. This media spin, which is more pronounced

strident than any in recent memory, is based on two critical flaws in

way Western media work.

The first is the most obvious and is known to millions: the bias of

reporters, and nearly all the experts and other sources on which they
depend, against the Bush administration's policy of democratization

Middle East.

For such commentators, the failure of the Bush intervention in
Iraq was a foregone conclusion.

In many cases, including those of Arabist
and ethnic Arab academic experts, opposition to democratization is

breathtakingly prejudicial stereotypes.

Few American intellectuals would ever, in the 1950s, have predicted

time would come when the very concept of "democracy" would be the

so much polemical contempt in the democracies themselves.

And fewer still
would have predicted that Arab adherents, as so many now do, would

reject altogether the appropriateness of democracy in their

Arab academic and media figures declare that their people are

democracy, and cannot go beyond limited and culture-bound reforms,

wonders if they realize how arrogant and cruel they sound. In the

all seemed to agree that democracy was a universal and benevolent

which all peoples, at least outside the palaces, strove.

The second serious defect in the methodology of Western media, when

with Iraq, is their lack of knowledge about Islam.

Reporters seem to
continue to base their dispatches on off-the-street quotes and Iraqi
official handouts.

Much more homework needs to be done,

especially
considering that American lives have been sacrificed for the future

Western reporters seldom study Islam or seek out authoritative
representatives of the Islamic leaderships;

and when, almost as if by
accident, they encounter such figures, they seem never to know what
questions to ask them.

Terrorism continues in Iraq and monopolizes headlines.

But there is much
more to be said about the situation in that country, and it has to do

much more than the restoration of public services and infrastructure.

Perhaps the biggest story left unreported in the West is the

exuberance about the Iraqi election, set for January 30, among Iraqi

I know about this because I spend a great deal of time talking to

religious leaders,

some of whom commute back and forth between Iraq and the
U.S. The effervescence among them must be experienced to be believed.

prominent Shia in the U.S. told me, "I call the president Imam Bush."

Shia Islam, the imams are the chief religious guides throughout the

of the sect.) "He is a believer in God, he is just, and I believe he

keep his promise to hold a fair election on January 30," my

said. "He liberated Kerbala and Najaf [the Shia holy cities]. He has

more for Shias than anybody else in history."

Shias comprise at least 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

It is clear that
the January 30 election will produce a Shia-majority government.

The Iraqi
Shias have produced a unity ticket for the elections under the

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shia cleric. Sistani

severely condemned any Shia who might obstruct the election. Sistani

colleagues have managed to silence the disruptive Moqtada ul-Sadr in

interest of orderly elections.

Still, even if they can anticipate a Shia sweep in Iraq, Westerners
generally seem unable to grasp the full meaning, for the Islamic

such a fact. Unequivocal Arab Shia control over their holy sites will
represent a major, new historical chapter. Notwithstanding

Western reportage and alarmist propaganda by Arab Sunnis, Arab Shias

obey the commands of Iranian Shias. Iraqi Shias never accepted

conception of clerical governance, which had no basis in Islamic

and was actually a heresy. There is no serious evidence that, if a

majority is brought to power in Iraq, a Khomeinist regime would be
established.

In addition, the Khomeinist scheme has been discredited in Iran

that country's majority is trying to find a way out of it. Yet it is

to see Western media and politicians, as well as some Arab

rulers, proclaiming the "menace" of Shia rule in Iraq.

Naturally, the former
Sunni elite who misruled Iraq with the support of Saddam, and

Wahhabi jihadists who hate Shias even more than they do Jews and

seek to disrupt the electoral process in Iraq. But Westerners have no
justification to back away from the commitment to elections in Iraq,

on the basis of Sunni complaints or threats. Some Western experts

the triumph of the Shias would bring about a civil war in Iraq; but

other than a civil war is presently going on? Sunni terrorists wreak

and devastating bloodshed wherever they can. If anything, a

victory would be a powerful incentive for Sunnis to cease their

The wider regional and global ripples of a Shia government in Iraq

likely to be as significant as the transfer of power itself. A

Shia regime in Baghdad, governing Kerbala and Najaf, would powerfully
encourage completion of democratization in Iran. Its success would

Lebanese Shias away from the extremist clerical leadership of

stable post-Ba'athist regime in Iraq could provide a significant

Syrians as they work their way out of the Bashir Assad dictatorship.

all, however, a Shia regime in Iraq will provide a stunning exemplar

Arab-Islamic pluralism, that is, an alternative to the model of Sunni
monolithism found in Saudi Arabia, and which the Saudis have sought

export throughout the global community of Sunni Islam.

The reactionary wing of the Saudi royal family may have a great deal

from successful elections in Iraq. To emphasize, Wahhabism, the

religion in the Saudi kingdom, preaches violence against Shias, and a
Shia-led Iraq with a system of popular sovereignty would be an

humiliation to the Wahhabis. But more important, as the American

of the Iraqi experiment have understood, Iraq has immense resources

of education and entrepreneurship, aside from the economic cushion of

oil.

President Bush is quite correct when he states that the terrorists

Americans for who we are, not for what we do. The Wahhabi clerics in

Arabia, who encourage al-Qaida and other terrorists, including

Iraq, repudiate the very concept of voting, parliamentarism, and

Shias do not reject these principles.

A prosperous Shia-led electoral regime in Iraq, on its long northern

could be the ultimate nightmare for the Saudi hardliners,

the oil industry in the kingdom is centered in the Saudi Eastern

which has a Shia majority -- and Shias have suffered a near-genocidal
discrimination at Wahhabi hands.

Saudi Arabia has always dealt with Shia dissidence by labeling it as

product of Iran. But if Shia dissidents in the Saudi kingdom are

Iraq they will gain immense credibility.

Finally, the worldwide effect of transitions to democracy, in

typically considered impossibly distant from one another, cannot be

Looking at the last quarter of the 20th century, we observe a process

began in Spain in 1975, with the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

Spanish business class and political elite carried out a peaceful

democratization. Spain was only the first such instance. Although

Nicaragua later saw major convulsions in their societies, and brutal

broke out in Yugoslavia and Africa, many more countries entered on

of peaceful democratization, including, finally, Nicaragua and some

ex-Yugoslav states. The number of countries that settled a change in

political affairs peacefully came to far outnumber those with

armed conflict: they include the Philippines, all the rest of the

Baltic and East European Communist states (although Russia, as

remains a problem), Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia,

Many of these countries have a legacy of rule by ideological parties

as a foundation for the state, typically with the backing of the

This was the experience of Taiwan with the Guomindang, Mexico under

so-called Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Turkey ruled

Republican People's Party. Saddam's Ba'athism was merely a variation

20th century model, as was the Soviet Communism that is finally
disappearing, one hopes, from Ukraine.

There should be no reason to doubt the universality of democracy, or

contagious nature of elections in Iraq, and, for that matter, in

Iraq's ballot boxes may trump the viciousness of its terrorists, the
Palestinians may also join the new wave of democratization.

Palestinians vote, Iraqis vote, and a new phase in world history

This is the true meaning of globalization, especially in the age of

internet and satellite television.

Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia is much less a form of Islam than an

employed to keep the royal family in power, and if the removal of the
ideological state may be effected peacefully in Kyiv, why not in

Saudi subjects could leap ahead of their Iraqi neighbors, for I

imagine that if Ukraine succeeds in a bloodless democratization,

subjects will not be inspired to ask why they, too, cannot follow the

of the Orange Revolution, rather than that of the black-bannered

voting boxes protected by American lives, in Iraq. And that will mean

decisive blow to terrorist jihadism throughout the world.

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