IRAQ - Resurgence In The Shi'ite World - Part 8 - Hakim Sets His Terms.

The main winners of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections are the Ja'fari Shi'ite parties, particularly the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) which was established in Iran in the early 1980s. SCIRI's leader, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, has already set the conditions for a new government of national unity: Any party or individuals joining his government will first have to undertake not to amend the constitution which was voted for in a referendum on Oct. 15, 2005.

The emergence of Hakim's SCIRI as the most powerful party in Iraq gives people the impression that Iran's allies in this Arab country the winners of all efforts made by the US to liberate the society from the Ba'thist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and that the Americans are the losers. If Hakim and his Shi'ite allies really believe they have won the game, they will be the first to be shocked by the fact that the US has not finished playing its own game which goes far behind the boundaries of both Iran and Iraq.

Hakim, a religious man with a ranking of Hojjatul-Islam, would not be the person to head the proposed national unity government in Baghdad. This is not only because he evaluates himself as being far above a prime minister - the most powerful posting in a central government of Baghdad, but mainly in view of his ambition to become the Supreme Leader of Iraq's Ja'fari Shi'ites, like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran.

Iran is ruled by a Ja'fari Shi'ite theocracy - Velayat-e-Faqih. Hakim cannot impose such a regime on Baghdad. But he can do that in any of the central and southern Iraqi provinces where Ja'fari Shi'ites form the overwhelming majority. Like Mass'oud Barzani, the president of Kurdistan, provincial rulers would regard themselves far more powerful than the president or prime minister of a central Iraqi government.

Hakim is said to have calculated that, if he proclaims himself an Ayatullah (the way the Arabs spell this high religious title for Ja'fari Shi'ites) and Supreme Leader of an autonomous Iraqi province he would be recognised immediately by the Iranian theocracy and by Khamenei. In this case the province would become a Ja'fari Shi'ite theocracy and would have a strategic alliance with that of Iran. He could have three or more Shi'ite provinces merged to make his domain as large as he can. Soon, this alliance would become some kind of confederation between his domain and Iran's theocracy.