Unnecessary fear of another Khomeinism in Iraq

Saddam is gone and I am extremely happy. He was our (as an Iranian) greatest enemy and although Bush administration is a bigger threat to the world than Saddam, it doesn't neccessarily mean that bad will can not do good. Whatever happens to Iraqi people is far better than a beast like Saddam.

Also I am very happy that Tony Blair is with there with Bush and he doesn't let the arrogant Hawks do whatever they want to do.

The only thing here is that I think there is no need to worry about Iran and it's influence on the future of Iraq. History has proven that ecxept for Hizbollah which had a releatively legitimate reason to be so fanatic, Shiite Muslims are much more flexible and tolarant than Sunni people. If any Iraqi only visits Iran once, he/she will see that there is no anti-western feeling in Iran as the most Shiite country in the region. So how could they be anti-western when their ideolgical leader is not like that?

Don't worry about a few fanatic leaders who rule Iran right now. Even Shitte Iraqi opposition groups know that they can not count on them. They are quite aged and unpopular, without any clear future.

Moreover, Shitte chief clerics whose main base has always been the city of Najaf in southern Iraq, have been very calm and conservative during the past decades. Khomeini was an exception and even at the time, he was not very popular in Iraq among other top clerics like Ayatollah Khoie and others. Shitte people in Iraq, no matter who is actually leading them, Iranians or their own chief clerics, are not ideologically anti-western. Even I could say that if it was not for the influence of commuinst parties and ideology in Iran at the time of 1979's revolution, Khomeini's regime had never been so anti-western. This requires a lot of historical reasoning that I might do later.

Therefore if as BBC commentator said we see pictures of Khomeni in Iraqis hands soon, this shouldn't not be seen as a threat. Let them do what they have been prevented to do for 30 years, they are not as dangerous as Pakistani and Saudi wahabies. Iraq is more like Iran than it's big neighbour Saudi Arabia.

Update: I just found this article in Washington Monthly which confirms some of my thoughts here. I quote a small part of it:

The theocracy espoused by Khomeini was a novel perversion even of Shia Islam, let alone the Sunni variant to which the vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere adhere. "velayat-i faghi," the notion of a religious leader holding supreme political power, was given a very sniffy reception by theologically more eminent Shia figures, such as Grand Ayatollah al-Khoie, venerated religious leader of the 12 million Iraqi Shia. Thus, when Khomeini reached out to subvert his Iraqi co-religionists soon after taking power, few of them heeded his call. In fact, the Iraqi Shia fought tenaciously for Saddam Hussein against the Iranians over eight bloody years. The Shia of Saudi Arabia never posed much of a threat to the monarchy and were eventually bought off.