WAR ON IRAK

Straitstimes: Shi'ite headache for the Americans

'WIMPS go to Baghdad,' they say in neo-conservative circles in Washington. 'Real men go to Teheran.'

It sounds tough at dinner parties, and the macho intellectuals who talk like that never worry that genuinely hard men can overhear their silly chatter. But they can, and they are already taking measures to protect themselves. They live in Iran.

Iran's Islamist government is split between the moderate reformers around President Mohammad Khatami and the radical mullahs around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but it is the mullahs who control the army and foreign policy.

They are terrified by the imminent arrival of the United States army on Iran's western frontier, only a couple of hours' drive from the country's biggest oil fields, especially as US President George W. Bush has put Iran on his 'axis of evil' hit-list. So the more trouble the US has in Iraq, the better.

The biggest problem facing an American occupation regime in Iraq is the fact that the Sunni Arab minority, only 17 per cent of the population, has dominated the government and the army for generations. The Shi'ite Arabs have been largely excluded from power and are relatively poor, but they are almost two thirds of the population and, in a democratic Iraq, they would automatically dominate the government.

The problem is that their sympathies lie with their fellow Shi'ites in Iran, and a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad is not exactly what the US had in mind as an outcome to this war. That prospect is why the US has frozen the exiled Iraqi opposition parties out of the post-war administration of Iraq.

Sciri has no intention of allowing the US to rule Iraq even for a day: It will resist, and it will do so in a distinctively Shi'ite way.

Muslims of the Shi'ite persuasion, though bitterly hostile to Sunni extremists like Al-Qaeda, are equally adept at violence. The very first suicide truck bomb, the one that killed 242 US Marines in a Beirut barracks in 1983 and caused the rapid withdrawal of American troops from Lebanon, was a Shi'ite innovation, and it was the Shi'ite guerilla organisation Hizbollah that forced the chaotic Israeli retreat from southern Lebanon in 2000.

But an even greater threat to the American occupation of Iraq is the Shi'ite tradition of martyrdom.