In Chalabi's Fall, Iran Sees a New U.S. Policy
"After the Marines permitted former senior Iraqi military offers to take control of Fallujah, Chalabi, a secular Shiite, began publicly campaigning against a 're-Baathification,' which he compared to the hiring of Nazis in post-war Germany," Lobe reports.
According to Hassan Hanizadeh, a columnist for the Tehran Times, the United States and Sunni Arab countries are now seeking to prevent "the establishment of a popular government in Iraq."
The Sunni Arab countries, he argued, "do not want to see the bloodshed and violence afflicting the country come to an end."
"They view the establishment of peace and security in Iraq and the ensuing referendum on Iraq's future government as serious threats to their own non-democratic rule," Hanizadeh wrote Monday.
The Daily Telegraph in London is a conservative daily that has little in common with the anti-Americanism of the Tehran Times. But its analysis of Bush's Iraq policy is quite similar: The Bush White House is embracing Iraq's Sunni community at the expense of the Shiite majority.
Since Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Daily Telegraph editors wrote Monday, the Shiites, "have been told by the Western powers that there must be a dramatic slow-down in de-Baathification for the sake of 'national reconciliation.' Now, their political fate is to be molded by the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, a Sunni Arab nationalist of the old school who had few problems with Saddam.
"Inevitably, even the least sectarian of the Iraqi Shiites are asking: is the political playing field to be tilted against them once more for the sake of the West's over-arching relationship with their Sunni Arab neighbors?"
The suspicion is that Ahmad Chalabi's fall from grace may signal the Bush administration's willingness to subordinate the Shiite dream of ruling Iraq to the needs of the White House exit strategy.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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