Honestly, I could care what Bremer thought. If Bremer had gotten his way, the flag would have been light blue, yellow, dark blue and white. The flag they kept is the flag they wanted. It matched their Constitution, certainly.
I've lived in Islamic countries, and the Ayatullahs are judge, jury and executioner. In some venues, you get to pick--do you want the "regular" court, or the "sharia" court. In some cases, religion requires that you check BOTH blocks, like the conundrum this Australian woman found herself in:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/until-two-legal-systems-do-us-part/2007/05/04/1177788404897.htmlHer situation isn't uncommon in nations that don't have a Muslim majority, either.
They actually tried to get a Sharia court started in Canada, but that got quashed.
Ayatullah al-Sistani IS a judge, as far as his adherents are concerned. He is also a politician, and a LEADER...and his peeps see nothing wrong with that at all. That's just the way it is, and it makes total sense to them. This concept is difficult for some to wrap their arms around, but Sistani's words carry MORE weight than those of some guy in a black robe with a gavel, in a nation that puts Sharia front and center.
I stand by my assertion that al-Sistani, despite his sequestering and his leadership by fetwah, is involved in public and political life. I never averred that he was "appointed" by Bremer, mind you. Last year, post-Bremer, mind you, he angrily said he was leaving "politics" and taking his ball and going home (even though that hasn't stopped his fetwah-issuing). You can't leave politics if you aren't in it. Hell, by his OWN words we shall know him:
The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.
Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
"I will not be a political leader any more," he told aides. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/03/wirq03.xml
He didn't stick to that promise, though:
The Iranian-born al-Sistani is Shia Islam's leading cleric and commands huge respect in both Iran and Iraq.
Last week he held talks with Ali Larijani, Iran's top national security official, in the Shia holy city of Najaf. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8A9F14B5-8C66-4F45-A2D7-3F557E5743FE.htmYou don't meet with representatives of governments if you aren't taking a political role, generally, unless you've won the World Series or are Teacher of the Year. Regardless, at the end of the day, al-Sistani has acknowledged his political role more than once, and I just find this absurd rehashing of the old Bremer brouhaha (the sequence of events is better explained in the cite immediately above this paragraph) and whining about AJ awfully suspicious AND convenient.
The whole story is not so cut-and-dried as the angry mob wants one to think, either--they're painting this entire thing, as I said above, as a Shi'a VS Sunni spat, and not without reason, because that IS what they want it to be--it's as though they WANT Iraq to fracture into three entities. And they also are being deliberately shirty in that they refuse to accept AJ's apology, and they're dragging the Emir of Qatar into the mix as well:
"Today, we burn down Al-Jazeera," chanted the protesters who carried portraits of al-Sistani. Others demanded that the channel as well as Qatar be sued. One Najaf protester carried several pictures of Qatar's emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, with a shoe hoisted on the images to show contempt for him.
"There was no offense directed at al-Sistani and Al-Jazeera doesn't approve of offending anyone," Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Sheik told The Associated Press from Doha, the Qatari capital. "We have the utmost respect and appreciation of all religious leaders, foremost of whom is al-Sistani."
The furor over the perceived insults against al-Sistani in "Without Borders," one of the channel's flagship programs, underlined the esteem in which the majority Shiites hold their clergy and showcased the sensitivity attached to the question of whether al-Sistani is meddling in politics or simply offering broad guidelines at a crucial time in the country's history.
There was no comment from al-Sistani, who does not grant media interviews, rarely appears in public and communicates his views in edicts, or fatwas. But his representative in the holy city of Karbala told worshippers there Friday that Al-Jazeera was trying to drive a wedge between al-Sistani and his followers by suggesting that the cleric supports foreign occupation.
"This is an outrage directed at our religious leaders and undermine their spiritual standing in the eyes of Iraqi people," Sheik Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalai said in his Friday sermon at the Imam Hussein mosque.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Al-Jazeera has been seen by Shiite politicians as championing the former leader's rule and the Sunni insurgency. The 24-hour news channel has been banned from operating in Iraq since 2004 and the latest controversy is likely to worsen its already tense relations with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4777325.html
But wait...there's more:
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=247004
The Iranian parliament has banned the Tehran correspondents of the Qatar-based news network al-Jazeera after the channel allegedly insulted Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani...Parliament speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel said the correspondents would not be allowed to attend parliamentary sessions until the network apologized for the insult, which he termed 'a plot masterminded by the enemies of Islam and Iraq.'
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini accused the network of having contributed to further tensions in Iraq through its remarks about the Ayatollah.
The Egyptian host of al-Jazeera's talk show 'Without Borders' last week questioned the legitimacy of the leadership of Iranian-born Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shia cleric.
Al-Jazeera has a strong presence in Tehran with two offices, one for the Arabic and one for the international section....The al-Jazeera office in Tehran was temporarily closed in April 2005 for alleged provocation of the Arab minority in south-western Iran.
The news network also came under severe attack in 2004 over a cartoon on its website mocking Iran's dispute with National Geographic magazine over the terms Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf.
There seems to be a bit of cross-border cooperation happening with regard to the shi'a "outrage" meter. Of course, that likely has something to do with the fact that al-Sistani was actually born in IRAN. This is clearly orchestrated, and the outrage, while initially perhaps sincere, is now coming across as deliberate and feigned. It doesn't bode well for a continued, unified government.
PS--on edit, for whatever it is worth, that's a DIFFERENT Allawi who wrote the book, not the thug.