The United States is now embroiled in an escalating hell of its own making; hundreds of Iraqi civilians are reported dead in Fallujah, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is apparently livid that it was not consulted by the United States prior to the U.S. program to “pacify” Fallujah, and President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority have created a united front of resistance against the US-led occupation.  
  
While it is unclear whether the current cease-fire will produce a peaceful agreement, it is evident that Paul Bremer and the CPA instigated a disastrously violent chain of events when the CPA temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. In choking off a legitimate forum for political discourse by shutting down al-Hawzah, the CPA further angered, frustrated, and insulted a large number of Iraqis; frustration led to protests which, in turn, led to the current orgy of violence.  

Abdel Hady Abu Taleb, a journalist, demanded in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, “How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?” How indeed will President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority explain to the world and to the families of the dead how the alleged victory in Iraq has disintegrated into an angry bloodbath? And what is to become of Iraq, given that President Bush is adamantly insisting on June 30 as the date on which the CPA will hand over power to a local Iraqi government?  

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Sacred Space and Holy War, which examines the history of Shiite Islam in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, stated on April 10, 2004:

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Friday prayers sermon, read by one of his aids at the Great Mosque of Kufa, sounds both increasingly prescient and like a clearly articulated battle-cry:

“I direct my words at my enemy, Bush … If your justification for the war on Iraq was Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, then these issues are past, and you are now making war on the entire Iraqi people. I advise you to withdraw immediately from Iraq, otherwise you will lose the elections for which you are now campaigning, and you will lose your own people, and other peoples, as well … America is not confronting a popular resistance, but rather a genuine revolution.”

President Bush and the CPA, though lethally allergic to the idea of an Islamic society, need to reconsider what the new Iraq will look like, and they must reconcile themselves to the fact that it may be clerics — unlike the secular Baathist regime — who become the leading voices in a new Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka