G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomgram: Patrick ****burn on Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in
Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Apr 9 2008 - 8:38am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who emerged triumphant [2] from an Iraqi
government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has
called for [3] a "million-strong" march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the
fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. The demonstration just
happens to fall on one of the days that General David Petraeus is to report
to Congress on post-surge "progress" in Iraq. This is unlikely to be pure
happenstance. Despite being regularly labeled "hot-headed," a "firebrand,"
and the like in the American press, Sadr, as Patrick ****burn shows in his
new book Muqtada, is a canny, cautious, strategically savvy political
leader. In fact, he has turned out to play the life-and-death game of Iraqi
politics better than any of the teams of American and Iraqi officials sent
up against him, including most recently Gen. Petraeus, American Ambassador
Ryan Crocker, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
As you watch Petraeus and Crocker go through their paces today and tomorrow,
don't imagine them alone at that table in front of a Senate committee.
There's a ghostly figure beside them, that "hot-headed" "radical cleric,"
who has made a mockery of their plans for a pacified Iraq. For those of us
who don't know enough about that shadowy figure, Patrick ****burn is, at
this second, riding to the rescue. When it comes to timing, you couldn't ask
for better. His book on Sadr, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival,
and the Struggle for Iraq [4] is being published this very day as the cleric
fights for news space with the general. As with so much else in these last
years in Iraq, ****burn was taking Sadr's true measure while others,
including actual hot-headed figures like that Bush administration viceroy in
Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, continued to look elsewhere or radically
underestimate him.
Seymour Hersh has called ****burn, who writes for the British paper, The
Independent, "quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq
today." It's hard to disagree with that. In a war of reportorial embedment,
he's been a unilateral, an almost recklessly, daringly free agent. He's had
some good company over the years: Robert Fisk in looted Baghdad amid the
ashes [5] of the royal archives of Iraq in April 20003 (".and the Americans
did nothing."); Anthony Shadid [6] of the Washington Post wandering the
backstreets of Baghdad in somewhat better days; freelancer Nir Rosen in
Fallujah [7] in 2004; the British Guardian's correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
[8] with the Sunni resistance and recently in embattled Baghdad; various
correspondents for Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy), including Leila Feidel
[9], and a host of barely credited or uncredited Iraqi reporters working for
Western outfits (whose normal journalists can hardly circulate in Iraq). But
****burn, who never seems to stop circulating, is still sui generis.
The following piece on Muqtada al-Sadr is the final chapter of ****burn's
new book and appears at Tomdispatch.com thanks to his publisher, Scribner,
and his fine editor Colin Robinson. It's the perfect antidote to Petraeus's
assessment of the Iraqi situation. Too bad our senators won't hear Muqtada
al-Sadr's version of the same. ****burn's book, by the way, is eye-opening.
-- Tom
Riding the Tiger: Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq
By Patrick ****burn
Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in
Iraq since the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the religious
and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass whose lives were
ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression, and sanctions.
From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of Saddam
Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated him.
So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often
described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his followers.
During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S. "surge" of
2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, he
generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So far from being the
inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed -- when he first appeared
they denigrated him as a zatut (an "ignorant child," in Iraqi dialect) -- he
was a highly experienced political operator who had worked in his father's
office in Najaf since he was a teenager. He also had around him activist
clerics, of his own age or younger, who had hands-on experience under Saddam
of street politics within the Shia community. His grasp of what ordinary
Iraqis felt was to prove far surer than that of the politicians isolated in
the Green Zone in Baghdad.
A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo
Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have
happened to Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their political
and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia masses. From the
moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated from his open
opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority of the Shia
community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.
[10]As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew
among the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of
Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security
situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make a Shia-Sunni
civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi politicians, and the
Western media habitually failed to recognize the extent to which hostility
to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in the eyes of Iraqis,
delegitimized the leaders associated with it.
All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supported
Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly loyal
Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis were deeply
conscious that their country sat on some of the world's largest oil
reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like ability to make
catastrophic errors in peace and war had reduced the people to a state in
which their children were stunted because they did not get enough to eat.
The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be
exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the same
fury possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier in Shia
Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist movement.
Instead, people saw their living standards plummet as provision of food
rations, clean water, and electricity faltered. Saddam's officials were
corrupt enough, but the new government cowering in the Green Zone rapidly
turned into a kleptocracy comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed
the loathing with which the government was regarded, and dodged in and out
of government, enjoying some of the fruits of power while denouncing those
who held it.
Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of this
highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and elder
brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were assassinated in 1999
he had every reason to stress his lack of ability or ambition in order to
give the mukhabarat [Saddam Hussein's secret police] less reason to kill
him. As the son and son-in-law of two of Saddam Hussein's most dangerous
opponents, he was a prime suspect and his every move was watched.
When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears' political
inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on every possible
occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and Sadr II [Muqtada's
father-in-law and father, both assassinated by Saddam] against a background
of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than a leader exploiting his
connection to a revered or respected parent. Muqtada persistently emphasized
the Sadrist ideological legacy: puritanical Shia Islam mixed with
anti-imperialism and populism.
Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement
The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April
2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine,
Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had often
discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Muqtada himself,
which is a matter of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist supporters in
the lynching is proven and was the start of a pattern that was to repeat
itself over the years.
Muqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over, sometimes
controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and actions were
often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni against the
occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in February
2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni, orchestrating the pogroms against
them and failing to restrain the death squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse
that it was "rogue elements" among his militiamen who were carrying out this
slaughter is not convincing, because the butchery was too extensive and too
well organized to be the work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists
and the Shia in general could argue that it was not they who had originally
taken the offensive against the Sunni, and the Shia community endured
massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda for several years before their patience
ran out.
Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious leaders
unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on Shia civilians
if he was to cooperate with them against the occupation. They did not do so,
and this was a shortsighted failure on their part, since the Shia, who
outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq, controlled the police and
much of the army. Their retaliation, when it came, was bound to be
devastating. Muqtada was criticized for not doing more, but neither he, nor
anybody else could have stopped the killing at the height of the battle for
Baghdad in 2006. The Sunni and Shia communities were both terrified, and
each mercilessly retaliated for the latest atrocity against their community.
"We try to punish those who carry out evil deeds in the name of the Mehdi
Army," says Hussein Ali, the former Mehdi Army leader. "But there are a lot
of Shia regions that are not easy to control and we ourselves, speaking
frankly, are sometimes frightened by these great masses of people."
American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of
Muqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were persistent
attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government instead of trying
to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base to include the
Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and
Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure from Washington to sever or
limit their connection with Muqtada. But government officials were not alone
in being perplexed by the young cleric. In a lengthy article on him
published in its December 4, 2006, issue, Newsweek admitted that "Muqtada
al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate in Iraq." But the best the
magazine could do to assist its readers in understanding Muqtada was to
suggest that they should "think of him as a young Mafia don."
Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader who
proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over from
Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited, English-speaking exiles
who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq into a compliant U.S. ally,
Muqtada looked too much like a younger version of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq, which
it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by elections that would
produce a government dominated by the Shia allied to the Kurds. It soon
became evident that the Shia parties that were going to triumph in any
election would be Islamic parties, and some would have close links to Iran.
The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the
Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis" developing
in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and paranoia on the
part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted to make Iraq a
client state they would have found the country as *****ly a place for
Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S. attempt to create an
anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian hands and produce the very
situation that Washington was trying to avoid.
The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its nuclear
program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had the potential
to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was executed, Sadr I
believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with
Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia opponents in SCIRI and the
Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But American pressure meant that the
Sadrists had to look to Iran for help, and in a military confrontation the
Mehdi Army saw Iran as an essential source of weapons and military
expertise.
The New Iraqi Political Landscape
On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S.
occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The call
was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was now largely a
Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to their old homes. The
U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in sectarian killings, but it
was also true that the Shia had won and there were few mixed areas left.
The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was
improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were
returning. Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the Sunni
on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never accepted
that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on the same
street, they could hardly share a common identity.
The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the Sunni
population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge," but it was
still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide bombs targeting
civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare since
2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent groups had turned against
al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni community at
the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the
change was al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one son from every Sunni family into
its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with the government such as garbage
collectors were killed.
By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpeting
successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely eliminated in Anbar,
Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid for
by the United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi
government. Muqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi
opposition to the U.S. occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had
quite different ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shia victory in the 2006
battle of Baghdad.
A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of them,
Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He operates in
the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a commander of the
U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls Concerned Citizens. His
stated objectives show that the rise of the new Sunni militias may mark only
a new stage in a sectarian civil war. "Amariya is just the beginning," says
Abu Abed. "After we finish with al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main
enemy, the Shia militias. I will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area
near Amariya taken over by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of
west Baghdad."
The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam
Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in
Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his
movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning, the
chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater.
In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play a
central role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of millions of
poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he never wholly
controlled his own movement, and never created as well-disciplined a force
as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his ambitions for reconciliation with the
Sunni could take wing unless the Mehdi Army ceased to be identified with
death squads and sectarian cleansing.
The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violence
diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. The
differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respective
communities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as great
as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create
confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he called
for unity, would be for them to be taken back voluntarily into the areas in
Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been driven. But there is no sign
of this happening. The disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for
the country to exist as anything more than a loose federation.
Patrick ****burn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in London. He
has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient of the 2004
Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006 James Cameron
Memorial Award. His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, was
short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. This essay is
the last chapter in his new book, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia
Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq [11], just published by Scribner.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Apr 9 2008 - 8:38am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who emerged triumphant [2] from an Iraqi
government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has
called for [3] a "million-strong" march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the
fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. The demonstration just
happens to fall on one of the days that General David Petraeus is to report
to Congress on post-surge "progress" in Iraq. This is unlikely to be pure
happenstance. Despite being regularly labeled "hot-headed," a "firebrand,"
and the like in the American press, Sadr, as Patrick ****burn shows in his
new book Muqtada, is a canny, cautious, strategically savvy political
leader. In fact, he has turned out to play the life-and-death game of Iraqi
politics better than any of the teams of American and Iraqi officials sent
up against him, including most recently Gen. Petraeus, American Ambassador
Ryan Crocker, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
As you watch Petraeus and Crocker go through their paces today and tomorrow,
don't imagine them alone at that table in front of a Senate committee.
There's a ghostly figure beside them, that "hot-headed" "radical cleric,"
who has made a mockery of their plans for a pacified Iraq. For those of us
who don't know enough about that shadowy figure, Patrick ****burn is, at
this second, riding to the rescue. When it comes to timing, you couldn't ask
for better. His book on Sadr, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival,
and the Struggle for Iraq [4] is being published this very day as the cleric
fights for news space with the general. As with so much else in these last
years in Iraq, ****burn was taking Sadr's true measure while others,
including actual hot-headed figures like that Bush administration viceroy in
Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, continued to look elsewhere or radically
underestimate him.
Seymour Hersh has called ****burn, who writes for the British paper, The
Independent, "quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq
today." It's hard to disagree with that. In a war of reportorial embedment,
he's been a unilateral, an almost recklessly, daringly free agent. He's had
some good company over the years: Robert Fisk in looted Baghdad amid the
ashes [5] of the royal archives of Iraq in April 20003 (".and the Americans
did nothing."); Anthony Shadid [6] of the Washington Post wandering the
backstreets of Baghdad in somewhat better days; freelancer Nir Rosen in
Fallujah [7] in 2004; the British Guardian's correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
[8] with the Sunni resistance and recently in embattled Baghdad; various
correspondents for Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy), including Leila Feidel
[9], and a host of barely credited or uncredited Iraqi reporters working for
Western outfits (whose normal journalists can hardly circulate in Iraq). But
****burn, who never seems to stop circulating, is still sui generis.
The following piece on Muqtada al-Sadr is the final chapter of ****burn's
new book and appears at Tomdispatch.com thanks to his publisher, Scribner,
and his fine editor Colin Robinson. It's the perfect antidote to Petraeus's
assessment of the Iraqi situation. Too bad our senators won't hear Muqtada
al-Sadr's version of the same. ****burn's book, by the way, is eye-opening.
-- Tom
Riding the Tiger: Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq
By Patrick ****burn
Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in
Iraq since the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the religious
and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass whose lives were
ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression, and sanctions.
From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of Saddam
Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated him.
So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often
described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his followers.
During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S. "surge" of
2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, he
generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So far from being the
inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed -- when he first appeared
they denigrated him as a zatut (an "ignorant child," in Iraqi dialect) -- he
was a highly experienced political operator who had worked in his father's
office in Najaf since he was a teenager. He also had around him activist
clerics, of his own age or younger, who had hands-on experience under Saddam
of street politics within the Shia community. His grasp of what ordinary
Iraqis felt was to prove far surer than that of the politicians isolated in
the Green Zone in Baghdad.
A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo
Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have
happened to Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their political
and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia masses. From the
moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated from his open
opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority of the Shia
community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.
[10]As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew
among the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of
Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security
situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make a Shia-Sunni
civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi politicians, and the
Western media habitually failed to recognize the extent to which hostility
to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in the eyes of Iraqis,
delegitimized the leaders associated with it.
All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supported
Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly loyal
Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis were deeply
conscious that their country sat on some of the world's largest oil
reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like ability to make
catastrophic errors in peace and war had reduced the people to a state in
which their children were stunted because they did not get enough to eat.
The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be
exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the same
fury possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier in Shia
Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist movement.
Instead, people saw their living standards plummet as provision of food
rations, clean water, and electricity faltered. Saddam's officials were
corrupt enough, but the new government cowering in the Green Zone rapidly
turned into a kleptocracy comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed
the loathing with which the government was regarded, and dodged in and out
of government, enjoying some of the fruits of power while denouncing those
who held it.
Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of this
highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and elder
brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were assassinated in 1999
he had every reason to stress his lack of ability or ambition in order to
give the mukhabarat [Saddam Hussein's secret police] less reason to kill
him. As the son and son-in-law of two of Saddam Hussein's most dangerous
opponents, he was a prime suspect and his every move was watched.
When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears' political
inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on every possible
occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and Sadr II [Muqtada's
father-in-law and father, both assassinated by Saddam] against a background
of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than a leader exploiting his
connection to a revered or respected parent. Muqtada persistently emphasized
the Sadrist ideological legacy: puritanical Shia Islam mixed with
anti-imperialism and populism.
Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement
The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April
2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine,
Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had often
discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Muqtada himself,
which is a matter of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist supporters in
the lynching is proven and was the start of a pattern that was to repeat
itself over the years.
Muqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over, sometimes
controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and actions were
often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni against the
occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in February
2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni, orchestrating the pogroms against
them and failing to restrain the death squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse
that it was "rogue elements" among his militiamen who were carrying out this
slaughter is not convincing, because the butchery was too extensive and too
well organized to be the work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists
and the Shia in general could argue that it was not they who had originally
taken the offensive against the Sunni, and the Shia community endured
massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda for several years before their patience
ran out.
Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious leaders
unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on Shia civilians
if he was to cooperate with them against the occupation. They did not do so,
and this was a shortsighted failure on their part, since the Shia, who
outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq, controlled the police and
much of the army. Their retaliation, when it came, was bound to be
devastating. Muqtada was criticized for not doing more, but neither he, nor
anybody else could have stopped the killing at the height of the battle for
Baghdad in 2006. The Sunni and Shia communities were both terrified, and
each mercilessly retaliated for the latest atrocity against their community.
"We try to punish those who carry out evil deeds in the name of the Mehdi
Army," says Hussein Ali, the former Mehdi Army leader. "But there are a lot
of Shia regions that are not easy to control and we ourselves, speaking
frankly, are sometimes frightened by these great masses of people."
American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of
Muqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were persistent
attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government instead of trying
to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base to include the
Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and
Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure from Washington to sever or
limit their connection with Muqtada. But government officials were not alone
in being perplexed by the young cleric. In a lengthy article on him
published in its December 4, 2006, issue, Newsweek admitted that "Muqtada
al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate in Iraq." But the best the
magazine could do to assist its readers in understanding Muqtada was to
suggest that they should "think of him as a young Mafia don."
Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader who
proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over from
Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited, English-speaking exiles
who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq into a compliant U.S. ally,
Muqtada looked too much like a younger version of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq, which
it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by elections that would
produce a government dominated by the Shia allied to the Kurds. It soon
became evident that the Shia parties that were going to triumph in any
election would be Islamic parties, and some would have close links to Iran.
The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the
Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis" developing
in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and paranoia on the
part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted to make Iraq a
client state they would have found the country as *****ly a place for
Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S. attempt to create an
anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian hands and produce the very
situation that Washington was trying to avoid.
The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its nuclear
program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had the potential
to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was executed, Sadr I
believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with
Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia opponents in SCIRI and the
Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But American pressure meant that the
Sadrists had to look to Iran for help, and in a military confrontation the
Mehdi Army saw Iran as an essential source of weapons and military
expertise.
The New Iraqi Political Landscape
On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S.
occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The call
was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was now largely a
Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to their old homes. The
U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in sectarian killings, but it
was also true that the Shia had won and there were few mixed areas left.
The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was
improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were
returning. Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the Sunni
on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never accepted
that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on the same
street, they could hardly share a common identity.
The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the Sunni
population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge," but it was
still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide bombs targeting
civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare since
2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent groups had turned against
al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni community at
the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the
change was al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one son from every Sunni family into
its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with the government such as garbage
collectors were killed.
By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpeting
successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely eliminated in Anbar,
Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid for
by the United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi
government. Muqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi
opposition to the U.S. occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had
quite different ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shia victory in the 2006
battle of Baghdad.
A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of them,
Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He operates in
the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a commander of the
U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls Concerned Citizens. His
stated objectives show that the rise of the new Sunni militias may mark only
a new stage in a sectarian civil war. "Amariya is just the beginning," says
Abu Abed. "After we finish with al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main
enemy, the Shia militias. I will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area
near Amariya taken over by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of
west Baghdad."
The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam
Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in
Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his
movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning, the
chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater.
In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play a
central role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of millions of
poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he never wholly
controlled his own movement, and never created as well-disciplined a force
as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his ambitions for reconciliation with the
Sunni could take wing unless the Mehdi Army ceased to be identified with
death squads and sectarian cleansing.
The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violence
diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. The
differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respective
communities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as great
as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create
confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he called
for unity, would be for them to be taken back voluntarily into the areas in
Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been driven. But there is no sign
of this happening. The disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for
the country to exist as anything more than a loose federation.
Patrick ****burn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in London. He
has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient of the 2004
Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006 James Cameron
Memorial Award. His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, was
short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. This essay is
the last chapter in his new book, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia
Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq [11], just published by Scribner.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
