Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world would resent an American-led postwar provisional government, the editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies said Thursday.
"The idea of an American administration (in post-war Iraq) for any time at all would simply confirm the idea that this is a form of colonialism," Juan R.I. Cole told an audience at the University of Utah in the eighth lecture in a series on the Iraq crisis.
Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, has studied the Muslim world for 25 years.
"The signals I see are disastrous," he said, referring to reports that Jay Garner, the former U.S. commander in line to head up the administration of Iraq, "is a member of a think tank connected to the Likud Party" in Israel.
As the war intensifies, "it would be safe to say that 99 percent of the Arab world is jumping up and down against this war," said Cole, adding that the British — who attacked Iraq in 1916 and 1917 — are not seen by Iraqis as "the glorious rescuers" depicted on American TV.
"The subtext is that the British were a major power in Iraq until 1958, and they were unpopular."
What role Iraq's Shiite Muslim population will play in post-war Iraq isn't clear, Cole said. They now make up the majority of the Iraqi population, but have remained the poorest and least powerful.
Most of the country's nomadic tribesmen became Shiites in the 18th and 19th centuries, largely as a way to oppose the ruling Ottoman Empire, he said.
The Shiites became politicized in the 1970s and led riots in the slums of Baghdad in 1977. This frightened the Baath Party leadership, Cole said, resulting in the arrest and execution of Shiite clergymen. Tension between the Shiites and Saddam Hussein has continued for more than two decades.
At first, the Bush administration explored whether the Shiites could be relied on as allies. But the Bush administration's decision in January to create a provisional government — headed up, at least initially, by Americans — caused the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq to break with the United States, he said.
"So from potential ally, they're gradually being transformed into suicide bombers against the U.S.," Cole warned. "It's a very alarming development."
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