Oops!

Can someone ask Petraeus and Crocker about this: "Iraq's top Shiite religious leaders have told anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr not to disband his Mehdi Army, an al-Sadr spokesman said Monday amid fresh fighting in the militia's Baghdad strongholds."

That looks like Sadr's checkmated Maliki to me. First Maliki tried to crush the Mahdi Army with force. He couldn't. Then both Sadr and Maliki agreed on a political deal to kick the dispute upstairs to the religious authorities. Then the authorities backed Sadr. Meanwhile, as Rich Lowry's friend observes "Sadr's militia is now virtually the only militia left in Iraq that still maintains an outlaw posture, the only one that still challenges the authority of the Iraqi Security Forces or the Coalition." Lowry's pal sees this as bad news for Sadr, but that's wrong -- Sadr's forces are endorsed by the local religious authorities and they're the only ones untainted by collaboration with the extremely unpopular foreign occupiers. That's the position you want to be in.

Comments

Meanwhile, as Rich Lowry's friend observes "Sadr's militia is now virtually the only militia left in Iraq that still maintains an outlaw posture, the only one that still challenges the authority of the Iraqi Security Forces or the Coalition."

This is simply false. Wildly, hilariously false.

Posted by Stefan | April 8, 2008 12:59 PM

Well, if we had any sense---which we obviously don't---we'd basically put Sadr in charge of Iraq and get out quick.

He's popular, strong, anti-Al Qaeda, anti-Baathist, and pretty suspicious of the Iranians and their influence, so he's about the best we'll ever get.

Posted by RKU | April 8, 2008 1:03 PM

On the political front, Sadr now finds himself completely isolated. Key leaders of his own movement are now urging him to accept the Maliki government’s demands to disband the militia entirely.

This is faintly ridiculous. There's isolated as in the only guy left in a hostile country. And then there's "isolated" in the sense that you have a militia of a couple thousand fighters backed by half the Shi'a population.

The two aren't the same.

And remember, the Provisional IRA had no more than a couple hundred fighters at any particular point in time for 25 years. They did have, however, deep support among a significant segment of the Catholic population. The point being that that sort of "isolation" can result in significant violence over long periods of time.

Posted by Joe Strummer | April 8, 2008 1:09 PM

Claire McCaskill came closest to taking your advice.

Posted by natthedem | April 8, 2008 1:30 PM

Matt,

You are absolutely right. For some time now, people have wholly underestimated the power of sadr and what his movement means.

The Sadr family has deep political/religous ties in Iraq that advocate a nationalist creed. There popularity, especially vis a vis the occupier, is reminiscent of Vietnam and the opposition to the U.
S. and the nationalistic feeling of the people. The Vietnamese were not really a part of the world socialist movement. Similarly, these people are not al-qaeda.

On another note, here in DC, I heard many a person try and tell me that the surge defeated Sadrism. I tried to explain to them that they smartly played it cool and, more importantly, you cant just defeat that which is supported by the "natives." Sadr is popular. We--and are Iraqi surrogates--are not.

Posted by jeff | April 8, 2008 1:34 PM

Ugh. Vietnam was a model of clarity compared to this mess. I'm surprised Bush can remember from one day to the next which Shiite militia leader is an outlaw, and which one is wearing the Iraqi Army uniform.

And yet the broad outline is pretty straightforward: we're being used to help settle accounts among a bunch of hostile armed groups, all of them with close ties to Iran.

- If Sadr's party does well in the next election, will we help him go after the newly-outlawed SICI militia? - Or do we decide at some point that our best working relationship is with the Sunnis, after all, and revert to Baathist strategies? - And what does any of this have to do with advancing US interests?

Posted by Dave L | April 8, 2008 1:37 PM

Are we taking Sadr's word for it that he's backed by the religious establishment?

My understanding was that Sistani (who personifies the religous establishment, more or less) has been reluctant to take sides in this conflict. He has some strong ideas about how the country should be run, but not so much about who should do the running.

Posted by heedless | April 8, 2008 2:48 PM

Let's see -- the only leaders we have backed so far, like Allawi, have been former exiles -- sure to be well trusted by the average Iraqi. Sadr and his family stayed and led the opposition to Saddam. Something like 1,000 Iraqi army soldiers deserted rather than fight Sadr's militia; Maliki's Dawa party doesn't even have a militia. Yeah, I'd say we got him right where we want him.

Posted by rj | April 8, 2008 2:50 PM

"Are we taking Sadr's word for it that he's backed by the religious establishment?"

Sure, why not? Journalistic standards go by the wayside for Matt when sees an allegation that supports his preexisting political positions.

Posted by Fred | April 8, 2008 3:10 PM

I think that we suffer from a lot of opaqueness in arguing, from this far away, about Sadr, Maliki and their strategies. It would be like people in Basra trying to figure out the scandals involving the governors of New York and the New York leader of the Senate. To my mind, setting up the Maliki vs. Sadr thing as a negative sum game already distorts what is happening - Sadr needs Maliki to a certain extent, as a block against the Badr militias, and Maliki needs Sadr, in order to avoid a total split in the Da'awa party (with Jafari at the moment trying to use Sadr to pull that party his way).

Do we even have the simplest tools to untangle this cat's cradle? No knowledge of Arabic, no knowledge of what is happening in Basra or Southern Iraq, no real map of the interests of all the parties, no way of knowing how much all the parties are tapping into the oil wealth so far and what that means (given the enormous corruption in Iraq) - and this is what we are sendign soldiers to die for? It is absurd.

Posted by roger | April 8, 2008 3:13 PM

One quibble: according to the Sadr office in Baghdad, Sadr NEVER agreed to disband his militia, whether or not the senior clerics in Iraq would have agreed to that.

Sistani and Sadr clearly don't get that much along, but Sistani does not and never has wanted to see Sadr's movement crushed. by most accounts. Keep in mind that Sistani is Iranian-born, has never accepted Iraqi citizenship and has stated he will remain an Iranian until his death.

Sistani's perspective has clearly been to insure that the Sunni can never oppress the Shia again. That is his sole concern. Sistani otherwise is completely against any US occupation and has always said so. He restrained the Shia solely because of the goal to get the Shia into power in the government, for which he needed the presence of the US military to hold down the Sunni. Which Shia won has never been his primary interest.

For Iran's perspective, they support Sadr's attempts to increase his clerical stature by studying in Qom, in order to be able to better deal with the criticism that his religious credentials are not as high as some others, such as ISCI's Hakim. It seems clear from the evidence of increased support for Sadr that they see him as the Shia with the most "street cred" among the poor Shia in Iraq, and thus more likely to be successful in producing a stable government than either ISCI or Dawa. But they'll deal with whoever wins - as long as it's not the Baathists or other Sunnis.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 8, 2008 8:00 PM

Hmmm....a lot of people here are wishing out loud. That doesn't make it true though.

Sadr's supposed strategical genius is that he managed to get every other political bloc allied against him. Well, he's certainly the great unifier of Iraq. Anyone who thinks having Sadr take over in Iraq would be acceptable doesn't care much about Iraqis.

Posted by CMAR II | April 9, 2008 12:48 PM

Hmmm....a lot of people here are wishing out loud. That doesn't make it true though.

Sadr's supposed strategical genius is that he managed to get every other political bloc allied against him. Well, he's certainly the great unifier of Iraq. Anyone who thinks having Sadr take over in Iraq would be acceptable doesn't care much about Iraqis.

Posted by CMAR II | April 9, 2008 12:49 PM

Hmmm....a lot of people here are wishing out loud. That doesn't make it true though.

Sadr's supposed strategical genius is that he managed to get every other political bloc allied against him. Well, he's certainly the great unifier of Iraq. Anyone who thinks having Sadr take over in Iraq would be acceptable doesn't care much about Iraqis.

Incidentally, Richard Steven Hack, Sadr's "spokesmen" have been wildly contradictory, covering every conceivable position on the map, exhibiting an organization in total disarray.

Posted by CMAR II | April 9, 2008 12:55 PM