Freedom!

It smells so sweet:

Meanwhile, security forces were reported to be blocking al-Sadr's supporters from traveling to Baghdad from outlying areas to attend an anti-U.S. rally scheduled for Wednesday.

Al-Sadr called for the protest to mark the fifth anniversary of the capture of Baghdad by U.S. troops nearly a month after the war started, but many observers see it as a show of force in his confrontation with the government.

After all, in what kind of country would members of an opposition political party be allowed to attend a rally to protest the presence of 150,000 foreign soldiers on their soil? The cause of democracy requires that these people be shut down because of, I guess, something having to do with Iran and let's just agree not to think too hard about the fact that our allies in the Iraqi government are also Iran's main proxies in Iraq.

Comments

It is utterly baffling to me when people say they continue to support the occupation because of their commitment to democracy. Self-determination is an absolute condition of democracy. As long as a foreign army is performing military operations your country, you haven't got it.

I can't see the appeal, from a (small d) democrat's point of view, of America having it's very own Vichy France.

Posted by Freddie | April 8, 2008 9:14 AM

It's because we're a nation of ignorant sheep who are easily frightened by our rulers into supporting even the most flimsy rationales for imperial rule.

Posted by Steve LaBonne | April 8, 2008 9:22 AM

I can't see the appeal, from a (small d) democrat's point of view, of America having it's very own Vichy France.

To twist the Vichy example into recognizable shape, the Vichy gov't that we support is like a Vichy government that was allied with England. And Germany was knocking itself out to keep it in power.

Nobody stranger than people, but Republicans are the strangest.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 8, 2008 9:25 AM

The US' preferred factions in Iraq are also Iran's preferred factions to a degree but:

1 - These factions do not have long term goals of a unified Iraqi state

2 - These factions are not going to kick the US out

3 - These factions don't have the inclination or ability to advance a foreign policy sharply contrary to US wishes. They won't give authorization, if it is needed, for US attacks on Iran from their territory, but they also will not join Syria in diplomatic events opposite to Egypt and Jordan.

Iran's calculation, it seems to me, is that the US is leaving anyway, so there is no need to press the point but while Iran trained the SIIC and has members on its payroll, Iran would rather see Sadr's vision of Iraq than Hakim's.

A unified Iraq won't have the Kurds making their own pro-US side deals, won't encourage fighting to divide the country or put facts onto the ground and will by itself be plenty pro-Iranian relative to its natural anti-US and natural anti-Israel stance. For example, Iraq by itself would never vote for a US/Saudi financed war against Iran as happened in the 1980s.

After the US leaves and stops supporting Hakim, Iran will let the Iraqis elevate Sadr, whose positions are more popular than Hakim's nationwide. Iran would be willing to add a push to Sadr because his views fit them better, but he doesn't need it. He's already more popular and is likely to remain so.

Hakim though, can't remain in power, even in his best areas in the South, if there are elections where Sadr competes. (Sadr boycotted the last provincial elections.) And he cannot remain in power without active, flagrant and strenuous US assistance.

If it turns out that the US does not plan on leaving anyway, which basically means if the US elects McCain, then Iran may decide to turn up the temperature in Iraq. Which would be bad for Iraq, and to a smaller degree bad for Iran and also bad for the US but in the end, under that scenario Sadr or someone like him would still end up in power and the US would still be forced out.

But if Iran can avoid that it will. For that reason we see what looks like a US/Iranian agreement to support SIIC. More Iran being magnanimous in a very likely long-term victory than the expression of its preference for the future of Iraq.

Posted by Arnold Evans | April 8, 2008 9:48 AM

If al-Maliki knows that he can just use the U.S. military to bomb or otherwise muscle his enemies then he may not see a need to come to political agreements with them. In other words, our military presence could be delaying, or undermining, political reconciliation.

Do we really believe that our military will enable the emergence of a national polity?

I just don't see evidence of this.

Posted by AKBY | April 8, 2008 10:18 AM

You mean they don't have protests like this in Japan and Korea????

Posted by ZednCu | April 8, 2008 11:27 AM

Arnold has it right. Iran will deal with whoever comes out on top in Iraq, as long as it's not the Sunnis. They will even deal with a Shia-Sunni nationalist coalition government as long as one of their Shia groups is involved.

There's clear evidence that Iran is supporting Sadr's group as much or more than the Badr or Dawa groups because they can see that Sadr has more "street cred" than the other two groups do.

Meanwhile, Sadr has postponed the march today because he is allegedly concerned that it would get a lot of his supporters killed if things got out of hand, given that the Iraqi government and the US military have Sadr City sealed off at the moment. Or he might think he just couldn't get one million of them into Baghdad for the march and he doesn't want to have a substantially smaller march than he asked for, which would look bad.

Either way, Maliki's threat about disenfranchising the Sadr movement from the elections is merely going to force Sadr to go back to full insurgency mode. And as several people have said, in that case, Maliki and the US are in trouble because Sadr's movement is too strong to be "crushed".

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 8, 2008 6:09 PM