The images were horrific. Here were grown men in the Iraqi city of Karbala, newly liberated, and ecstatic in blood. The blood, for now, was all theirs. Some pounded their chests until blood seeped through T-shirts. Some used variations on the medieval mace, a spiky ball attached to a chain, swinging it over shoulders to puncture the flesh of their own backs. Some carried swords bloodied from slashing their own skulls. All were fueled by the divine rhetoric of mortification.

Only a fool could observe this spectacle and believe that the future of Iraq will be serene.

Only a fool could believe that Iraq will soon evolve into a rational, moderate, well-ruled secular state. The pilgrims in Karbala last weekend — perhaps 2 million of them — were part of the long-repressed Shiite majority. Since the Shiites make up 60% of the population of their afflicted country, they should win any free election. This should make everyone jittery, because in Karbala, their political program was made very clear.

"Down, down with the Americans!" they chanted through the blood. "Yes, yes to an Islamic state!"

Not all those who came to Karbala were slicing, gashing or pounding their flesh into blood, indulging in the psycho-sexual mind alterations of self-mortification. Not all, one must assume, were even anti-American. But they were all part of a tide of unleashed religious fervor that should make poor Jay Garner, the American proconsul, very nervous.

"The majority of people," he told The New York Times the other day, "realize we are only going to stay here long enough to start a democratic government for them."

Garner, of course, speaks no Arabic, and travels engulfed by armed guards. He has been given a job that requires, among other things, the ability to talk through a hat. His utterances must follow a basic script. The pilgrims to Karbala almost surely were not listening. No wonder Garner already looks exhausted.

The adherents of Shiite Islam have their own scripts in mind, and none of them can be traced to the secular breakthroughs of the European Enlightenment. The oldest ones go back to the 7th century A.D., when Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammed, was martyred in battle, creating the Sunni-Shiite split. Another is much more recent and is about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He remains the great fundamentalist model.

In 1964, the Iranian Khomeini was sent into exile by the regime of the Shah of Iran. He had been attacking the shah’s arrangements with the U.S. Khomeini’s objections were superficially religious, of course, but his goal was political: the sweeping away of secularism and the creation in Iran of an Islamic state. Yes, he wanted an end to the corruptions of Western liberalism, but most of all, he wanted power.

Khomeini first went into exile in Turkey, but moved on to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The exiled Khomeini would stay there for 13 years, expanding his influence, building on the semi-martyr status of his forced exile. His oratory dripped with venom about the U.S. ("the Great Satan") and Israel ("the little Satan"). Over his long years in Najaf, he sent a stream of clandestine audiotapes east into Iran, almost all bound for Shiites. He received visits from Iranian Shiites who were building their own networks of conspirators. He also won the admiration of many Iraqi Shiites, who had their own furious quarrel with secularism, as represented by the Baath Party.

The Baathists (Saddam Hussein was an important leader of the party but not yet the top boss) began to see Khomeini as a threat. They ordered him to stop political agitation. Khomeini refused, and on Oct. 3, 1978, he was sent again into exile, ending up in a suburb of Paris. The man in charge of his eviction was Saddam. In January 1979, the shah fled Iran. The mobs took the streets. And within weeks, Khomeini returned as the God-anointed savior of Iran.

In July of the same year, Saddam took full power in Iraq. The threat of Khomeini's Iranian theocracy almost certainly was the motive for Saddam's attack on Iran on Sept. 22, 1980, setting off the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. That terrible war — between 600,000 and 1 million dead, some of the dead soldiers as young as 9 — brought the Americans in, supporting Saddam.

Oil was a factor, as always, but the Americans feared what Saddam feared: a Shiite uprising that would unite Iraq with Iran in a megatheocracy, rich with oil. Under President Ronald Reagan, American companies were licensed to sell Baghdad the components of the chemical weapons that Saddam used on the Iranians, and later on Iraqi Kurds. Saddam was given American intelligence. He was able to buy American helicopters that made easier the use of mustard gas, tabun and other chemical agents. Later, the Americans were making deals to get weapons to Iran, too (the Iran-Contra scandal). It’s no wonder that Saddam was darkly cynical about anything the Americans said in private or public.

Now, with nobody in charge in Iraq, and men slicing their flesh in the public squares and the mob again in the streets looking for its own Khomeini, the naive Bush people are discovering that there are some problems you cannot bomb. There appear to be millions of Iraqis who now see Paradise through what William Butler Yeats once called "the blood-dimmed tide." In the coming years, that tide almost certainly will flow more swiftly.