Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani: The real face of power in Iraq
by Paul Vallely, The Independent

Sistani opposes the complex structure designed by the Americans to ensure that the Shia majority cannot ride roughshod over the educated Sunni elite and the autonomy-craving Kurds. It produces the peculiar irony of an unelected mullah pressuring the world's self-styled greatest democracy to implement the self-determination it ostensibly invaded Iraq to bring. Sistani summed that up in a recent letter to the US administrator which said: "Mr Bremer, you are American. I am Iranian. I suggest we leave it to the Iraqis to devise their constitution."

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