Here Lies Peace; Inevitable? With no moderate leaders on the once dominant Sunni side of Iraq's divide, it's amazing that a civil war has not begun. One may soon.

Byline: Rod Nordland

Imagine an alternative America for a moment, in which the black minority had ruled for hundreds of years. Whites were excluded from public office, rarely allowed in the police or Army and largely disenfranchised. Jails filled to bursting with whites suspected of plotting against the black regime. Hispanics were discriminated against as well, targeted for massacre by poison gas, until a successful rebellion in the Southwest led to a self-governing Latino enclave around New Mexico, Arizona and southern California. A black dictator ran the rest of the country with such savagery that a foreign power toppled him, on the second try.

It's easy to see where this rough analogy is going. It works well enough to help understand the depth of the enmities and passions underlying the crisis of an Iraqi transition from Sunni to Shia rule, with Kurds as the wild-card minority, and the difficulties of imposing a peaceful solution whatever the outcome of elections planned for Jan. 31, 2005. Many if not most Sunnis are likely to boycott, and extremists will do all they can to sabotage the vote. Sunni Arabs in Iraq are only some 20 percent of the population, but they're its traditional rulers; the Shiites, with 60 percent of the population, have been downtrodden for centuries, not just during Saddam Hussein's regime.

Analogies go only so far, of course, and there are many fundamental differences in the culture and history of the two societies. In some ways, the divisions in Iraq are even worse than racial tensions in America, because religion is involved. It's as if, in the scenario above, all the ruling blacks were Protestants and all the whites Roman Catholics, subject to imprisonment for crossing themselves in public. And now the occupying foreign power has ordered the Protestants, who are taught from childhood that Catholics are blasphemers (as Sunnis have long viewed Shiites), to join a government dominated by those Catholics.

The marvel is that civil war has not already started. But the hiatus is temporary and artificial. As long as American troops are present in strength, they give Sunnis and Shiites another focus for their anger. But particularly in the Sunni radicals' view, there is little appeal in a democracy likely to be dominated by Shia religious figures.

Unlike the Sunni, the Shia have a strict religious hierarchy. Leaders like Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the other clerics of the Howza, the council of the leading ayatollahs in Iraq, have immense influence. Fortunately, Sistani is a moderate, and moderates dominate the Howza as well; they've made it clear that they have no interest in creating an Islamic republic, as the Shia in Iran have done. Sistani rules out a political role for clerics, including himself, but his concept of politics is a narrow one. Clerics should, he has written, provide spiritual guidance, and that extends to fatwa s ordering people to vote, to participate in government or not, even to resist publicly some decision of the government. What they eschew is holding political or administrative office.

But this nuance doesn't comfort Sunnis, who are well aware of the Shia tradition of Taqiya, a religious doctrine that grew up from centuries of harsh discrimination by the Sunnis who hold sway in most Muslim lands. It means "dissimulation," and allows the Shia to hide their true intentions, even to follow alien religious practices, if that's what it takes to survive.