[Protecting sacred Muslim sites in Iraq] is absolutely critical. Should anything happen to these sites it could stir up a lot of animosity. So we're going to have to be very careful. And in fact we should be in touch with religious leaders because they have quite a bit of influence over most of the population (not everybody is religious), and we need to get them on our side.

It's very unlikely that [Shii religious leaders] would play a direct political role [in post-war Iraq]. There are divisions among these religious leaders as well. Some don't believe in participation in politics. They're called "quietists." They stay home and take care of religion.

Others like Khomeni, as seen in Iran, believe in direct participation. But we mustn't think of all of the Shiis as profoundly religious. A certain percentage of them, of course, are religious and might like to have an Islamic state. There's a political party of Islamic Iraqi exiles in Iran who would like that. But it's not clear to me and many people what percentage of the Shiite population would vote for that in a free election. I'm presuming that it wouldn't be a majority. The Shiis are a diverse population with many secularists, many people who aren't very religious, a very substantial educated middle-class population, many people who would just normally practice their religion but don't want to see religious leaders. It's very diverse.

A future Iraq should be a secular state that separates religion and politics. That is going to be absolutely essential in Iraq because the population is so evenly divided between Sunni and Shii. If you try to impose one or the other on the other community, it's going to be unstable. There should be freedom of religion. Both communities should be able to practice their religion as they wish. But the government must represent Iraq. It must be some kind of a process which brings both groups into the government on the basis of some kind of political program, not a religious program.

In fact, [the people of Iraq] never had religious government. They've had a series of rather poor governments. Under the mandate they had the faŤade of democratic institutions, parliament and so on. But it was not on a religious basis. Under the revolutionary military regimes they got authoritarian military leaders. But none of these have been religious in their base.

A government can only work if a constitutional process is instituted. That's, of course, easier said than done. But they're going to have to put in a rule of law that protects religious freedom. They're going to have to get a constitutional process in which eventually various groups in Iraq are represented. The government is going to be Iraqi, primarily secular, in which there's going to be a separation between religion and state. And, indeed, if you have a representative government, the Shiis themselves will probably have the majority of seats.

We mustn't think of the Shiis as homogeneous or the Sunnis as homogeneous. They're not going to come into power for the most part as Shiis. They're going to come in as Iraqis. We talk all the time about Shii and Sunni and Kurd. This upsets Iraqis because they do think of themselves as Iraqi first, and that's what's got to be encouraged -- Iraqi first, secondarily something else: Kurdish, Turkomen, Arab, Shia, Sunni.

[There] is not a religious split in Iraq. I will say that definitively. Of course, there are some religious differences. But this is not what's driving the problem. What's driving the problem is governmental -- the fact that this particular government is dominated by Sunnis and not even all Sunnis, but Sunnis of a particular group and class, and it has excluded Shiis from major decision-making positions. Needless to say, that has encouraged Shii identity, Shii opposition, Shii separateness. There's more thinking about being Shii today than there was, say, twenty years ago. It's a government problem.

In the new government, whatever it is, the Shiis are going to want a much greater say. But that doesn't necessarily mean a religious say [or] that they're going to want religious leaders or any particular Shiis representing them. But when they look at the composition of the government, they're going to want to see Shiis there. They're not going to follow the same tactics they did earlier. In any new Iraqi government, as Iraqis they're going to insist on playing a role.

This is a horrible dictatorship. But Shiis, Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs have been participating in Iraqi governments since its founding. The question is what percentage? Iraq is a very secular country. It's one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. It is true there's something of a religious revival today, and there's a little bit more religion in Iraq than there has been. But they're used to a secular government. What they want is an Iraqi government which, in fact, plays down these differences between Shii and Sunni and even ethnic differences. It is going to be more difficult, frankly, to absorb the Kurds because they speak a different language, and they have a little bit more sense of wanting a separate self-governing mechanism.

The Shiis are not separatists at all. They consider themselves to be Iraqis. That they can't get along -- this is really not an issue in Iraq. They've been getting along for some time. The question is who is going to dominate the government? Are you going to have a government in which one particular group, which is a minority, has all the decision-making positions whereas the majority only shows up as a minority in the government? That's the main issue.