More on Theocracy in Iraq

We had a post yesterday on the probable theocracy in Iraq and today Juan Cole gives us some scholarly insight on what that may look like and it's implications.

The Republican Party spin machine was bouncing around the airwaves like an overloaded washing machine on Sunday attempting to obscure from the American public that they had by their actions managed to install a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq. The New York Times even lead with a headline, "U.S. Officials Say a Theocratic Iraq Is Unlikely." This headline is probably wrong, but in any case it begs the question of what a "theocracy" is.

If it means a clerically-ruled state, then I agree with Vice President Dick Cheney that a) you have to look at what Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wants, and b) that Sistani does not want clerics to rule the country as in Iran. But the main goal of political Islam in the past few decades hasn't been clerical rule. It has been the replacement of civil law with shariah or Islamic canon law. This was done by the non-clerical government of Sudan, e.g. And that is where Iraq is headed. The only question is how wideranging the substitution will be. Will it just be personal status law (marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, etc.), or will it be in commercial law and other spheres of society?

Even as Cheney was pooh-poohing the notion of Iraqi theocracy, Sistani's close colleague Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad said, "We warn officials against a separation of the state and religion." Then Sistani's spokesman came out and said that the Grand Ayatollah Sistani "wants the source of legislation to be Islam."

Cheney is playing with words, it's only a theocracy if clerics are filling government offices and overtly in charge. Try to tell that to the woman whose rights are taken away by a constitution built around the shariah or Islamic canon law. It's obvious that the constitution the Shiite religious ruling class has in mind is indeed based on Islam and the fact the Clerics are not directly in positions of authority will not change the fact that it is a theocracy. Dr Cole, who apparently sharpened his harpoon on Jonah Goldberg, takes on Dick Cheney himself.

A lot of Americans believe whatever Cheney says, though I cannot for the life of me understand why, since he lies to them relentlessly. He is the one who tried to link Saddam and al-Qaeda operationally. He even once said he knew exactly where Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were. Most people will only remember that Cheney said there wouldn't be an Iraqi theocracy, but won't bother to actually read the newspapers on Monday to see the news I'm reporting below.

Although George Orwell/ Eric Blair wrote 1984 as an anarcho-syndicalist socialist critique of Stalinism, it is becoming increasingly clear that it was also prophetic about the direction of Late Capitalist societies characterized by corporate media consolidation. In such a society, Cheney can substitute himself for Sistani and speak for Sistani, erasing the real Sistani just as the Republican pundits have erased the real Iraq. "Ignorance is knowledge."

Read that last paragraph again. It may be 20 years late but 1984 is here in 2005. I wonder if they are still reading 1984 in high school like we did in 1964. They will redefine theocracy so the Iraqis' don't have one. They will redefine theocracy so the US doesn't have one.