The Taming of SCIRI

Of late the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was a gang of terrorist theocrats. Now they are peaceful coalition partners leading Iraq’s new government. Score one for US foreign policy.

Note their name refers to “the” Islamic Revolution, not “a” Islamic Revolution: they have a model in mind—Iran, 1979. The Revolution of their aspirations is the one that overthrew the Persian Shah and installed the Ayatollah Khomeni as Supreme Leader of a theocratic tyranny that denies its people basic freedoms of thought, speech, and worship in the name of a puritan form of Islam imposed from above. In a world full of governments which pay lip service to this or that religion, it was the first in the modern world to actually vest ultimate political power with religious officials. SCIRI—unsurprisingly funded and armed by, and located in, Iran before the war—wanted to make Iraq the second.

Then SCIRI’s wildest dreams came true, sort of. The Ba’ath Party was overthrown and Saddam was ignominiously tossed in jail—by the United States. Instead of leading a glorious Shia uprising against the hated secular dictator, SCIRI watched the Super Bowl from the sidelines. Not wanting to miss out on the next act in Iraq’s drama, SCIRI then set up shop inside Iraq, and promptly suffered the assassination of its top leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, by Sunni Islamist or Ba’athist terrorists.

SCIRI might have lashed out, mobilized its Badr Brigades, and launched the civil war everyone has dreaded. But at this crucial juncture, perhaps because it witnessed the punishment meted out on Muqtada al-Sadr’s like-minded but more violent Al Mahdi Army, SCIRI chose a different route and morphed into a political party. It contested the elections last month as a senior partner in the United Iraqi Alliance, which won some 47 percent of the vote, putting SCIRI in solid position to secure several ministerial positions and play a big role writing Iraq’s constitution.

SCIRI once dreamed of running the show alone. Now it is cooperating with other Shia, with the Kurds, and even with former Ba’athists. It once dreamed of imposing an Iranian-style theocracy. Now it is wheeling and dealing in a post-election bazaar for political spoils.

The cooptation of an illiberal and erstwhile violent social force into a peaceful and roughly democratic political process in Iraq was a slow victory, won over time never heralded in a headline (except in The Cicero)—and symptomatic of the small successes which are building in Iraq. No doubt SCIRI will try to write an illiberal constitution reflecting their largely unchanged Islamist agenda—but having given up the option of imposing their rule on Iraq alone, they are trapped by the need to compromise. What will emerge will not be Jeffersonian enlightenment, but it will legitimate, it will not have been imposed by any one party or faction, and it will have one less enemy. For now, at least, it seems SCIRI has laid down its guns.