February 7, 2005 - Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took to the airways yesterday to add to the record of their predictions with respect to Iraq. Both told us that America need not fear that the overwhelming majority held by the Shi`ite religious parties in the assembly that will write the Constitution for the new Iraq. They both promised us that there would not be an Iraqi Islamic Republic on the Iranian model. That possibility should not be a concern, they both said. It was the same Dick Cheney who told us in 2003 that our troops would be greeted with flowers and dancing in the streets. It was the same Donald Rumsfeld who knew exactly where Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were located and promised us that we would only have 20-30,000 troops on duty in Iraq by March 2004. The implicit message was, “Trust us, this time we are right.”

We don’t have to fear the establishment of a theocratic regime dominated by the Shia because these are Iraqi Shi`ites who are not Iranians. We don’t need to worry because Ayatollah Al Sistani has said that he does not want a direct role in government. Rumsfeld assured us that it would be a mistake if the Shia dominated National Assembly wrote a constitution that relegated women to second class citizenship. It is hard to give full faith and credit to their predictions given the level of accuracy of their previous prognostications.

As the magnitude of the Shia landslide is being made clear spokesmen for the religious parties have been vocal. The basis for Iraqi government, they say, will be Koranic Law. In matters of marriage, divorce, family, and inheritance the westernized secular statutes established under Saddam will be replaced by shari'a, the fundamentalist application of the Koran to civil society. Shari’a provides, for example, that a daughter’s share of her father’s estate is only half that of her brothers. A women’s subservience to her husband is enshrined, she has no rights in the case of a divorce beyond the right to reclaim the dowry she brought into the marriage. Her husband will retain custody of her children in all cases. This is no idle threat. Just such a provision was passed a year ago by the Iraqi National Congress whose members were handpicked by the CPA. Only Paul Bremer’s veto last March prevented it from becoming Iraqi law and let the previous westernized statute stand. All law, the Shi`ite clerics say, must be based on the Koran. Perhaps they will forego titles but they clearly expect to run things.

Even before regime change came to Baghdad there was deep concern that Saddam would be replaced by a fundamentalist Shi`ite government. It was not just liberals who expressed those misgivings. No one less than President George Herman Walker Bush raised the chaotic emergence of a fundamentalist Shi`ite regime as the justification for not pressing the war to Baghdad and toppling the regime when Saddam was on the ropes in 1991.

Cheney and Rumsfeld want us to have faith that this Shi`ite regime will somehow be different because it was chosen from numbered lists of anonymous candidates. We are asked to believe that the new Iraqi regime will be different – to take their predictions on faith. To a certain extent Cheney and Rumsfeld are right, the make up of the new Iraqi government is a matter of faith. The unanswered question is, whose Faith will it be?