AEI LOOKS AT MIDEAST SHIITES AND IRAN
Money News
June 27 2014
Friday, 27 Jun 2014 08:07 AM
By Robert Feinberg
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) convened three panels of
experts on June 19 to consider three issues affecting U.S. policy
regarding Iraq and Iran: 1) the diversity of Shiite communities and
politics, 2) quietists versus Wilayat al-Faqih (guardianship of the
jurists) model of leadership today and 3) if the United States should
have a Shiite policy.
This article complements the event that featured Sen. John McCain and
Gen. Jack Keane on the subject of how to deal with the latest crisis
in Iraq.
AEI’s Michael Rubin, who moderated the first panel, asked each expert
to describe the relationships of the communities they study with Iran.
Abbas Kadhim, a senior foreign fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, said that within Iraq, the Shiites,
represented by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are interested primarily in
domestic matters and prefer employing politics only as a last resort.
His view is that support for Iran comes mainly from elements of the
political class that represent parties that receive financial and
other support from Iran.
Jasim Husain, a former member of the Bahrain’s parliament said
that many Shiites in Bahrain also look to Ayatollah al-Sistani for
leadership. He contended that mistakes like allowing Saudi Arabia to
station troops in Bahrain opened the way for Iran to exercise more
influence. When Bahrain has local problems, solutions involve input
from the Iranians, Saudis, Americans, and British.
Also speaking of the Gulf Shia, Toby Mathiesen, a research fellow in
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge,
described a mix of loyalties, with many more following Ayatollah
al-Sistani than do Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, and there is also
a Shirazi movement, which has tense relations with Iran. He also
described a deal brokered in 1993 by Saudi King Fahd with a number
of Shia opposition groups directed against Iran, but the participants
became disillusioned with the deal, and a new protest movement emerged
in 2011.
Rubin observed that the two events that most influence Americans’ view
of the Shia are the Iranian revolution and the bombing of the Marine
barracks in Beirut. Likening Hezbollah to the Mafia, and regardless
of whether Hezbollah is controlled by Iran, he asked Philip Smyth,
a researcher focused on Shia Islamist groups at the University of
Maryland, how the Shia of Lebanon resist being controlled by it. He
responded that Hezbollah is so deeply ingrained in Lebanon that
there’s no effective resistance.
Turning to Azerbaijan, which is a country not only populated by Shia
but run by them, Rubin asked Brenda Shaffer, a visiting researcher at
Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European
Studies, to nominate which Shia country Iran fears most. (It would
appear that Iran would not fear any other country in the region.) She
pointed out that Azerbaijan has no state religion and that a third of
Iranians are Azeris. Also, when the Soviet Union broke up, Azerbaijan
was invaded by Christian Armenia, creating a million refugees, and
Iran sided with Armenia, because Iran fears a stable and prosperous
Azerbaijan. Other nominees were the Ayatollah al-Sistani faction
in Iraq and surprisingly, India. Asked to nominate a second Shia
community that the Iranians would fear, Shaffer suggested Los Angeles.
Panelists were also asked to nominate countries Sunnis would fear,
outside of Saudi Arabia, and the answers were Iraq and Lebanon
(including Hezbollah).
On the second panel, Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, explained that Iran’s former Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Khomeini introduced the innovation of a leader in the role
of a philosopher-king who combined religious and temporal powers.
He said that all of the other ayatollahs opposed this.
Therefore, Ayatollah Khamenei, lacking the religious authority
of Ayatollah Khomeini, has relied on institutional and financial
power to support the regime and has imposed this doctrine on Shia
communities worldwide.
Ahmed Ali, an Iraq senior research analyst at the Institute for the
Study of War, stated that the “quietist” view remains dominant among
Iraqi Shia, represented by Ayatollah al-Sistani. A theme of the panel
was the competition between the cities of Najaf in Iraq and Qum in
Azerbaijan for theological supremacy.
As for the third panel, the very diversity among Shia that the first
two panels established worked against the idea that there could be
a coherent policy that would address this community.
http://www.moneynews.com/robert-feinberg/iraq-shia-iran-us/2014/06/27/id/579598/