Fareed Zakaria writes for the Washington Post about the relationship between the U.S. forces in Iraq and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, probably the most popular and powerful Shia leader in Iraq.
What does this man have that the United States doesn't? Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein's reign. ... From the start, the Pentagon planners (or non-planners) believed the United States would have no legitimacy problems in Iraq. "We will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney famously predicted. When urged after the war to transfer some authority to the United Nations to gain legitimacy, administration officials were dismissive in public and scathing in private.
A power struggle has begun in Iraq, as could have been predicted -- and indeed was predicted. ... The tragedy is that while Sistani's fears are understandable, Washington's phased transition makes great sense. It allows for time to build institutions, form political parties and reform the agencies of government. ... Belatedly it [the United States] recognizes that the United Nations can arbitrate political problems without being accused of being a colonizer.
Zakaria has a point, but I think that by this point the even the involvement of the United Nations would not be able to lend legitimacy to the occupation of Iraq. For much of the twentieth century, Western diplomacy has been characterized by the principle of Realpolitik (although that term itself did not come into use until the latter twentieth century). In essence, Realpolitik stipulates that a priority must be a balance of power and influence on the international scene. These are the "rational" concerns of nation-states. There are of course other concerns, like religion or culture, but they are deemed "irrational" - which means that they must be subordinated to more rational interests. If religion of culture must be compromised in order to achieve stability, so be it.
While Europe may have decided that religion shouldn't be the basis for conflict and shouldn't become a foundation for national or international policies, much of the rest of the world never followed suit. In many non-Western cultures, there is no separation of church and state. Religious beliefs remain a principle motivation for political or social action. While Western nations have long tried to ignore religious differences in order to achieve more "rational" goals, other nations will ignore "rational" goals in order to pursue "irrational" ends like religious solidarity and religious purity. As a consequence, Western diplomats who try to work in such regions end up operating from a different set of premises and assumptions than everyone else; in the end, not much gets done.
What this means is that a non-religious (specifically, non-Muslim) mediator has little or no hope at rivaling the legitimacy of Sistani. The United States doesn't have. George W. Bush doesn't have. The United Nations doesn't have it. General Secretary Kofi Annan doesn't have it. Only Sistani and other Iraqi religious leaders have the necessary cultural, political, and religious background to create cultural, political, and religious legitimacy in Iraq. What can the United States do?
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