Dealing With The Cleric

The most powerful man in Iraq doesn't go out much. As an estimated 100,000 of his followers poured into the streets of Baghdad last week to demand direct elections in Iraq, Grand Ayatullah Ali Sistani stayed out of sight, holed up in the same nondescript white-walled compound on an alley off the Street of the Messenger in Najaf where he was kept under house arrest during the rule of Saddam Hussein. A crowd of followers seeking his counsel gathered outside. Some were allowed to enter; others were told by the guards to submit their questions in writing and come back another day.

Behind the scenes, the place was buzzing. Aides and emissaries shuttled through the heavy wooden doors leading into Sistani's office, trying to determine whether the reclusive cleric, 75--the religious figure most revered by Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority--will bend in his opposition to the U.S. plan to hand over power by June 30 to a transitional Iraqi government chosen by an as-yet-undefined caucus system. Sistani says he will urge his followers to reject any new government unless it is directly elected. To those who met with him last week, Sistani seemed good-humored but serious, engaging his guests while betraying nothing. "He has in mind a strategy to serve the Iraqi people," says Basher Ali Jalil, a religious student who often visits Sistani's home. "But he will not reveal it right now."

The Bush Administration's drive to turn over sovereignty and reduce the U.S. troop presence in Iraq in time for the climax of the presidential campaign may hang in the balance. The U.S. plan, unveiled in November, calls for regional caucuses to appoint representatives to an interim legislature. Sistani aides say he suspects this method would allow the Americans and to a lesser degree the Governing Council--the U.S.-appointed group of transitional Iraqi leaders--to engineer the results to their liking. In an effort to mollify Sistani, the U.S. last week persuaded U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to dispatch a team to Iraq to explore the feasibility of holding elections by June 30. Aides to Sistani told TIME that he would be willing to accept a delay in the planned July handover of power if it meant that elections could be held.

Publicly, Washington continues to stick to the June 30 deadline and insists that elections cannot be organized by then, given the absence of voter rolls, or held safely, in light of the continuing insurgency. But in private, Administration and Iraqi officials say the U.S. may ultimately be forced to bow to Sistani's wishes. "Sistani is the only one in this country who can mobilize millions," says a prominent Iraqi leader. "The Americans shouldn't tempt fate by disregarding that."

Still, U.S. officials are worried that an election as early as this summer would give Iraq's Shi'ites, who make up 60% of the population but were repressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, a tremendous edge. With Saddam's Baathist structures gone, the Sunnis are disorganized and demoralized. Shi'ite religious institutions, by contrast, are strong. Among some in Washington, that raises the specter of a replay of the 1979 Iranian revolution, in which fundamentalist Shi'ite clerics took charge of the government, which proved hostile to the U.S.