By my count, recent TV euphoria over the Iraqi elections constituted the
fifth American victory celebration in fewer than two years. First came the
toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in April 2003, followed by President
Bush’s swaggering "Mission accomplished" aircraft carrier photo op.
Saddam was dragged from his underground hidey hole and placed under
arrest in December 2003. The Coalition Authority’s hastily improvised
transfer of sovereignty to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi took place on
June 30, 2004. Then came last month’s election, with its emotionally
charged images of ordinary Iraqi citizens courageously lining up to vote.
On each occasion, we peasants have been urged to kneel in tribute to
the brilliant foresight and steely resolve of George W. Bush.

Never mind those imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Ignore the
thousands of American and Iraqi dead. We’re not even supposed to
remember that the election wasn’t Bush’s idea, but was basically forced
upon him by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. An Iranian-born Shiite cleric
who won’t even talk directly to foreign occupiers, Sistani demanded it
to pacify his followers.

It’s also basically thanks to Sistani that Bush himself has quit sounding
like Pat Robertson and more like "a dorm-room Marxist," as Michael
Kinsley put it after the State of the Union speech. Conservative pundits
who had ridiculed persons naïve enough to blame terrorism on anything
other than sheer, implacable evil suddenly heard Bush talking about
"eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder."
"If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred,"
Bush said, "they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror
will stalk America."

Well, yes. Exactly as thinkers like Anonymous (a. k. a. Michael Scheuer,
the former CIA agent who wrote the book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West
Is Losing the War on Terror") have insisted all along. See, human beings
are human beings. Humiliate people, corrupt their governments, mock their
faith, steal their property, bomb their children, and soon they start hating you.
Charismatic extremists like Osama bin Laden then gets a following. The U.S.
didn’t create today’s Middle East, but neither are we entirely blameless.

Since the Sunni Arabs (who constitute roughly 20 percent of Iraq’s
population, and maybe 90 percent of the anti-U.S. insurgency) boycotted
Iraq’s election, exactly as he’d anticipated, Sistani also emerged as the big
winner in the election. The ayatollah wasn’t on the ballot, but his followers
won more than half the seats in Iraq’s 275-member assembly, charged with
appointing a transitional government and writing a constitution.

In combination with the Kurds, Iraq’s Shiite majority could seek revenge
if they chose to. Both have been victims of Sunni oppression under the
Ottoman Turks, the post-World War I British occupation and the U.S.-backed
(until the 1991 Gulf War) Saddam regime. And it does appear that roughly 80
percent of Iraqi voters voted mainly on the basis of ethnicity, including
Turkmen and Assyrian Christian minorities.

The temptation for people like me who thought invading Iraq was a terrible
mistake is to mockery. After all, the same neo-conservative ideologues who
predicted that Iraqis would strew flowers in the path of American invaders
also envisioned turning the country over to a hand-picked secular government.
Headed by a well-financed, Westernized politician like Allawi, the interim
prime minister, the new Iraq was supposed to be pro-Israeli and to serve as
a bulwark against neighboring Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Instead, we’ve turned the place over to an Iranian-born ayatollah wearing
a beard and a turban. At Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution meetings
and during Friday prayers, crowds sometimes chant," Death to Israel!"
"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran," Juan Cole,
a University of Michigan expert on Iraq, told The Washington Post.
"The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. [Kurdish leader Jalal]
Talabani is very close to Tehran.... In terms of regional geopolitics, this is
not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."

It also could be bad news for Iraqi women. As near as I can make out
from the ayatollah’s English-language Web site (sistani. org), for example,
temporary marriage is OK, except that "due to probably committing sins
[it] is not permissible" to actually talk to the girl first. The decision’s up to
her father or brother. Veils are mandatory. Also, no music, no dancing,
no chess playing. Sistani sounds like James Dobson on crack. Islamic
canon law also offers scant consolation for boosters of American-style
free enterprise. But you know what? That’s none of our business and
never was. Sistani’s admirers depict him as a scholar of judicious
temperament who, like Thomas Jefferson, believes that clerics holding
power corrupt both church and state. It’s anticipated that he’ll seek an
Iraqi constitution respecting minority rights in the hope of avoiding a
civil war. Then it’s further anticipated that Iraq’s new government
would ask Americans to leave. If it takes an ayatollah to bring that off,
then more power to him.

• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.

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