Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland

12/12/05

The much-ballyhooed elections in Iraq later this week are likely to dig the Iraqi hole a little deeper for the Bush administration. The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shi'ite Muslim cleric in Iraq, has indirectly ordered fellow Shi'a to cast their ballots for representatives of the Shi'ite religious parties that now control the interim Iraqi government. A permanent Shi'ite-Kurdish government may prove even more intransigent than the interim government in addressing Sunni concerns about being cut out of Iraq's oil revenues -- thus accelerating the incipient civil war in that nation...

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1634


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp