Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld rushed to Iraq to celebrate, at last, the end of the political impasse in forming a new Iraqi government after these long months since parliamentary elections last December.
But what are they celebrating? The chances are dim that the hope for a secular Iraq not aligned with Iran will fare any better under the leadership of Prime Minister Jawad Maliki than under the man he displaced, Ibrahim Jafari. Maliki has far fewer personal rivalries with the Kurds and Sunnis, but as a religious Shiite he is an ideological carbon copy of his predecessor.
In the months following the establishment of the new government, there will be a brief window in which to amend the troubling constitution, which, according to the eminent Shiite cleic Sayyid Iyad Jamaleddine, is nothing more than the Iranian variety of "religious guardianship" under other clothing.
Jamaleddine, who once headed the largest mosque in Dubai while in exile under Saddam, is famous for arguing that religion should be freed from "14 centuries of tyranny" by the state in the Muslim world.
"The state cannot be religious," he says, " It can't pray. Only you and I can. All the state can do is manipulate religion for its own power and politics, to try to compel people against their will, which is what has happened for so long in this part of the world. You can't compel devotion. Faith is a free act between you and God. So, religion should be free from the state, and everyone should be free to believe what they want."
But that is not what the current Iraqi constitution accomplishes. "The current Iraqi constitution says that 'Islam' is the source of legislation, which is fine. Then it says that no law can contradict the fixed principles of Islam. The problem here is that this immediately runs into conflict with international norms and conventions, for example banks charging interest.
"But who decides if that is the case? The constitution establishes a Supreme Court made up half by judges who know secular law and the other half by experts in sharia. They are appointed by the president who submits their names to parliament for approval, but the sharia experts, of course, are nominated by the highest Muslim religious leadership." The influence of Ayatollah ali al Sistani and the rest of the clergy in Najaf make it certain that their "nominations" are appointments.
"That means that these religious judges have the right to veto laws promulgated by the elected parliament. That is not democracy, that is 'religious guardianship,' like they have in Iran, only in other clothing. It is this specific issue which has pitted the West against Iran for 25 years."
Jamaledinne also notes that separation of religion from the state has always been the Shia tradition up until Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran. "Before that, the Shia never had political power, and didn't seek it."
Will the parliament succeed in amending the American -sponsored new Iraq's quasi-theocratic bent? The numbers aren't good. The secularists in the parliament, like Jamaleddine's Iraq National Party, are tiny in comparison to the relgious parties allied with militias like the Badr Brigade and Muatada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army.
This issue, along with the thorny tangle of figuring out federalism -- who gets the oil and who gets to keep their militias in their own zones -- is sure to keep the low-grade civil war grinding on for a while.
In this context, is the presence of US forces part of the problem or of the solution? Jamaleddine is both pragmatic and infuriated: "The US troops will have to be in Iraq beyond the Bush presidency until the Iraqi national army is fully established and becomes effective. For the US to leave before that would lead to total anarchy. They still are the key to even the minimal equilibrium that exists today.
"The US should not have come to Iraq if they did not intend to stick it out. After all, they didn't just destroy the government when they came, they destroyed the state! It will take a lot of time and patience to rebuild from scratch, which is what we are doing. "