Blackfive, one of the premier milbogs, has been reporting this story of Iraqi clergy meeting with US Military chaplains for a while. It may seem as noteworthy as a ecumenical picnic to many but Iraq is a place where religion and religious leaders are far more important that we in the West are accustomed to thinking – even if we are actively religious. Politics and religion have been so long separated in the West that we forget that there once was far less separation.

Here is Col. Hoyt, Command Chaplain, Multinational Force-Iraq, describing how the Iraqi clerics approached the issue of dealing with him:

…..they decided that the senior chaplain in Iraq would be the guy that they wanted to engage with, because that position represented for them the leading religious leader for the coalition forces. And it has been amazing. I’ve had hard discussions, disagreements over and over with them, as well as very positive agreements. And being a soldier, there has not been a problem.
It’s very interesting. I’ve heard them lambaste the coalition and praise the coalition, independent of the fact that I was part of it; it didn’t make any difference. It as just part of their religious understanding of what they needed to get out and what they wanted to say.

We’ve had some very frank discussions because we are mutually — they view me as a fellow religious leader. Every once in a while we’ll talk a little bit of theology, but not much. That’s not the issue. It’s do you have the credential as a cleric and can you do something with it. I do, and they’re satisfied with that. I’ve been very surprised at that.

As emerges in the discussion the Iraqi government was involved with representatives from President Maliki’s office and some of the ministries, but it was still primarily a clerical meeting. Interestingly, it was funded by the US Department of Defense, not the State Department as I would expect.

Part of what we are trying do in Iraq is build civil society and one of the key differences between Western democracy and any Middle Eastern democracy the West tries to promote is that religion and religious leaders will play a more important role than they do in the West. There is clearly a non radical, non Islamist, clergy in Iraq and they are a critical part of building civil society in Iraq. They are the moderate Muslims that we often hear about but have some difficulty actually seeing through the smoke and rhetoric caused by Sadr and his ilk.

And these religious representatives were not religious lightweights. Chaplain Hoyt again:

The delegates were picked by the faith groups themselves or the sects — the Sunni, the Shi’a, the Christian, the Yezidi, the Kurds. They picked their own representatives, and they chose representatives, from their perspective, who have a national level of influence. They have a national voice with the Sunni or Shi’a or Christian or Kurd or Yezidi population in this country.

We had representatives from Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s office, at the Hausa in Najaf. We had the co-chairman and general secretary of the Iraqi Scholars Group, which is the largest Sunni group in Iraq. We had the head of the Christian religious authorities here in Iraq and the senior evangelical pastor for Baghdad. We got the speakers of Sinia (ph) mosques in Baghdad and in Basra and in Tikrit.

The political process in Iraq, on which I believe depends the final outcome of the Iraq war, has to go forward or the country will either fragment or return to a totalitarian form of government. In a country where many of the deepest divisions are religious I think that actively participating in this meeting is an astute political move by the Maliki government to build unity on a national level using one of the core forms of social organization that already exists. If nothing else it tells me that the Miliki government recognizes that its own survival depends on being a national, not just a majority Shiite, government. Here is Chaplain Hoyt’s summation:

All the groups signed and there was considerable movement toward reconciliation among groups and coming together against violence.

It’s the first broad-based religious accord to support and recognize the legitimacy of the government of Iraq, and to call for the integration and action of the Iraqi government on all previous and future tribal and religious conferences to achieve reconciliation. So — and the question was asked earlier, are we going to build some momentum here? Yes, and we’re asking the government to reach back into the other reconciliation
conferences that have occurred this year at tribal levels that were not religious in nature to see what we can bring forward out of them into an overall package of reconciliation.

It’s the first accord to document public — to publicly renounce al Qaeda by name, and to publicly declare that the spread of arms and unauthorized weapons is to be viewed as a criminal act in Iraq. It’s an anti-armed-gang/militia kind of statement.

It’s the first religious accord that provides a way ahead for a committed public action by religious leaders to denounce violence, to deny terrorism, to demonstrate support for democratic principles and the constitution, and to display national unity.

And it’s the first religious accord to be facilitated by a nongovernmental organization with the coordinated support of the United States mission in Iraq and multinational forces.

At one level, ordinary, even boring political process – and that is the point. It demonstrates that Iraqis are capable of conducting a democratic process in accord with the norms of their own culture. (The other level that the West is no loger familiar with is the tribal, but interestingly it is al Qaeda, not the US military, that has deeply offended the tribes.)

As I mentioned in this recent post there are three clocks running in Iraq. The military clock, the Iraqi political clock, and the American political clock. This meeting of Iraqi clergy is clearly part of the Iraqi political clock, just as Senator Lugar’s recent statements are part of the American political clock. Another look at the political clock in Iraq comes from a recent post by Omar of Iraq the Model. It describes the efforts of the Maliki government at building a broader based coalition within Iraq and its lack of Sunni partners.

It looks like the two political poles—the ruling coalition and Allawi’s group—are competing for the votes of the Fadheela and the Islamic Party, but in slightly different ways. While Allawi needs the votes so badly that he’d even invite the Sadrists (as he himself said yesterday in an interview on al-Arabiyah); the ruling coalition is more interested in winning the Islamic Party to its side to gain a Sunni element in its lines. An overt attempt to give an ethno-sectarian coalition the national cover it needs.

In fact I’d even say that the Kurdish-Shia coalition since its inception has been ignoring logic and geography. Both of them have direct borders with the Sunni populated region, and almost no direct contact between their communities. The Kurds for instance allied themselves with the Shia, while it’s the Sunni who are in direct contact with them, standing between them and Kirkuk. Normally solving the problem would require dialog and understanding with the influential party on the ground. Not with the party sitting hundreds of miles away.

If you read the whole post you will see that Omar feels strongly that the government always going to Sistani (quite separately from the Hoyt meeting) for approval of their coalition building is ineffective. I think Omar puts his finger on the Maliki government’s problem – it is perceived as a Shia, not a national government. Hoyt’s meeting shows that the Maliki government is aware of the problem and beginning to do something about it. Given the rise of the Sunni Awakening and its turning against al Qaeda the process of including the Sunnis as genuine supporters of the central government seems possible in a way that it was not previously. What we are seeing is political maneuvering for the upcoming Iraqi elections of a kind that looks to me like the Iraqi politicians are learning to play the game – perhaps well enough to survive.