Sunday 10 October 2010
US failed in Iraq
-
THE MEHDI ARMY
The Mehdi Army was formed in Iraq in 2003 after foriegn troops led by United States launched a bloody war on Iraq. US and its allies invased the country on 20 March 2003.
The mission of the Mehdi Army was to fight foriegn forces and free their nation from brutal occupation.
In 2004, the Mehdi Army led by Moktada Al Sadr fought two major battles with the American Army led by George Bush. Al Sadr's fighters had managed to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers. Bush's troops also killed thousands of men of the Mehdi Army.
U.S. Military set its mission to destroy the Mehdi Army. It failed.
On Monday, 12 April 2004, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez promised to shoot and kill Al Sadr and destroy the Mehdi Army. U.S. Marines were ordered to finish Sadr's army of rebels.
At the end, U.S. was unable to defeat the Mehdi Army. Its leader Al Sadr was still alive and theatening America troops. He is widely regarded by experts all over the world as a kingmaker in Iraq. Most analysts considered U.S. as having failed to crush one of main dangers to its military occupation in Iraq.
_________________________________________________
THE MEHDI ARMY
The Mehdi Army was formed in Iraq in 2003 after foriegn troops led by United States launched a bloody war on Iraq. US and its allies invased the country on 20 March 2003.
The mission of the Mehdi Army was to fight foriegn forces and free their nation from brutal occupation.
In 2004, the Mehdi Army led by Moktada Al Sadr fought two major battles with the American Army led by George Bush. Al Sadr's fighters had managed to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers. Bush's troops also killed thousands of men of the Mehdi Army.
U.S. Military set its mission to destroy the Mehdi Army. It failed.
On Monday, 12 April 2004, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez promised to shoot and kill Al Sadr and destroy the Mehdi Army. U.S. Marines were ordered to finish Sadr's army of rebels.
At the end, U.S. was unable to defeat the Mehdi Army. Its leader Al Sadr was still alive and theatening America troops. He is widely regarded by experts all over the world as a kingmaker in Iraq. Most analysts considered U.S. as having failed to crush one of main dangers to its military occupation in Iraq.
_________________________________________________
Sadr wins
-
From 'mission accomplished' to mission impossible for the Iraqis
Patrick Cockburn - Wednesday, 25 October 2006
"It sounds like a face-saving way of announcing a withdrawal," commented an Iraqi political leader yesterday on hearing that the US military commander in Iraq and the chief American envoy in Baghdad had said that Iraqi police and army should be able to take charge of security in a year or 18 months.
Yet the only real strength of the Iraqi government is the US army. In theory, it has 264,000 soldiers and police under its command. In practice they obey the orders of their communal leaders in so far as they obey anybody.
There is still a hopeless lack of realism in statements from senior American officials. It is as if the taste of defeat is too bitter. "This Mehdi Army militia group has to be brought under control," said the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad at a press conference in Baghdad yesterday. But in the past few months most of the Shia districts in Baghdad - and Shia are the majority in the capital - have come under the control of the Mehdi Army, the militia of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It is all so different from that moment of exuberant imperial hubris in May 2003 when President George Bush announced mission accomplished in Iraq.
Where did the US go wrong? Saddam Hussein's government collapsed almost without a fight. Iraqis would not fight for him. Iraqis may not have welcomed American tanks with sweets and rose petals but they were very glad to see the back of their own disaster-prone leader.
The greatest American mistake was to turn what could have been presented as liberation into an occupation. The US effectively dissolved the Iraqi state. It has since been said by US generals - many of whom now claim to have been opponents of the invasion all along - that given a larger US army and a more competent occupation regime, all might still have been well. This is doubtful. The five million Sunni Arabs were always going to fight the occupation. The only Iraqi community to support it were the five million Kurds. The Shia wanted to use it to gain the power their 60 per cent of the Iraqi population warranted but they never liked it.
One theme has been constant throughout the past three-and-a-half years - the Iraqi government has always been weak. For this, the US and Britain were largely responsible. They wanted an Iraqi government which was strong towards the insurgents but otherwise compliant to what the White House and Downing Street wanted. All Iraqi governments, unelected and elected, have been tainted and de-legitimised by being dependent on the US. This is as true of the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today as it was when sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq under the prime minister Iyad Allawi in June 2004. Real authority had remained in the hands of the US. The result was a government whose ministers could not move outside the Green Zone. They showed great enthusiasm for press conferences abroad where they breathed defiance at the insurgents and agreed with everything said by Mr Bush or Tony Blair.
The government can do nothing because it only came into existence after ministries were divided up between the political parties after prolonged negotiations. Each ministry is a bastion of that party, a source of jobs and money. The government can implement no policy because of these deep divisions. The government cannot turn on the militias because they are too strong.
It is also true that almost all parties that make up the government have their own militias: the Kurds have the Peshmerga; the Shia have the Mehdi Army and the Badr Organisation; the Sunni have the insurgents. In areas of Iraq where civil war is already raging or where it is impending, people look to these militias to defend their homes and not to the police or regular army.
The US has lost more than 500 of its soldiers, dead and wounded, this month. Every month this year the combined figure - more telling than that for dead alone - has been creeping up, as the area of US control is diminishing. The handover of security to Iraqi government forces - the long-trumpeted aim of American and British policy - is, in practice, a handover to the local militias.
The problem for the US and British is that many Iraqi leaders outside the government think the British and Americans are on the run. Wait, they say, and they will become even weaker. The US is talking to senior Baath party military officials in Saudi Arabia and Jordan who control the insurgency if anybody does. But it is unlikely that they would call a ceasefire except on terms wholly unacceptable to other Iraqis.
Can the US extract itself from Iraq? Probably it could but only with great loss of face which the present administration could not endure after its boasts of victory three-and-a-half years ago.
Further reading:
"The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq" by Patrick Cockburn.
--
US in Iraq: We're out of here
America signals dramatic shift in strategy, saying Iraq will assume responsibility for security in '12 to 18 months'
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington and Colin Brown
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
In the firmest indication yet of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, America's most senior general there and its top civilian official have drawn the outlines of a political and military plan that could see a substantial pullout of US troops within 12 to 18 months.
Yesterday's announcement looked like a strategy change carrying implications for British troops in Iraq, although President Bush's aides deny any "dramatic shifts" in policy. It came after Mr Bush's spokesman acknowledged on Monday that the President had cut and run from his signature promise that America would "stay the course" in Iraq. The White House formally abandoned Mr Bush's previous "stay the course" formulation for US policy.
Leading members of Mr Bush's own Republican party are demanding a radical rethink of US strategy in Iraq. They argue that current policies have all but failed, as sectarian and anti-American violence threaten to overwhelm the country.
Pressures for a significant pull-out much sooner are intensifying. Iraq threatens to drag Republicans to humiliating defeat at the 7 November elections, while Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has become the latest senior Republican to turn on the White House. He said yesterday: "We're on the verge of chaos."
A poll shows more than two-thirds of Americans think the war was a mistake. A mere 20 per cent believe the US is winning, compared to 40 per cent 12 months ago. In an editorial yesterday, The New York Times said Iraq could become "the worst foreign policy debacle in American history".
A changing message
'The US and our allies have prevailed. Now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country'
President Bush, 1 May 2003
'We must stay the course, because the end result is in our interest'
President Bush, 13 April 2004
'This is not "stay the course" but constant motion '
Bush spokesman, 23 October 2004
'This violence is going to go on for a long time'
Stephen Hadley, US National Security Adviser, yesterday
--
NY Times extract: 'No one wants to tell the bitter truth'
This is an edited extract from an editorial in yesterday's 'New York Times'
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
No matter what President Bush says, the question is not whether America can win in Iraq. The only question is whether the United States can extricate itself without leaving behind an unending civil war that will spread more chaos and suffering throughout the Middle East, while spawning terrorism across the globe.
--
Al Sadr: The man who now holds Iraq's future in his hands
Patrick Cockburn, Thursday, 11 January 2007
He is a strange figure to be targeted as the number one enemy of the US in Iraq. Four years ago, few had heard of the Shia nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr inside or outside Iraq. Even somebody as suspicious as Saddam Hussein, who murdered his father and two brothers, did not think he would play any role in the coming crisis.
Now he holds the future of Iraq in his hands. He has far more popularity and legitimacy than many of the pro-American Iraqi leaders cowering in the Green Zone. He is seen by millions of Shia in Baghdad and across southern Iraq as their spiritual and national leader. Rightly or wrongly, he is feared by Sunnis as their nemesis, a physical symbol that they are battling for their existence in Iraq.
He has now become part of the White House's demonology in Iraq. At one time the US believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for all its problems in Iraq - problems that would be resolved once he was overthrown. Today Sadr, a 32-year-old cleric in his black robe with fierce, staring, dark eyes, is denounced as the fomenter of sectarian warfare.
Many Iraqi leaders never leave the Green Zone. Sadr has never entered it. He has a cult-like following. He controls Sadr City, the ramshackle, sprawling slum in east Baghdad which is home to two-and-a-half million Shia, important cities such as Kufa and provinces such as Maysan. He can probably put 100,000 armed militiamen into the field. Much of the Baghdad police force follows him. Army barracks where Shia units are stationed have pictures of him pinned to the walls.
Once in 2004 he was wanted "dead or alive" by the US forces and dismissed as "a firebrand". They soon found that his movement had deep roots. He controls 32 out of 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament. He is the most important ally of the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. In 2004, the US and its former exile allies paid a heavy price for trying to exclude him from power. In 2005 and 2006, they recognised his strength. He became part of the political process in Iraq while opposing the US-led occupation.
Now, astonishingly the US may be about to confront Sadr and his powerful social and political movement. This could lead almost immediately to a crisis for the US and President Bush's new strategy for Iraq.
If the US Army, along with Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi army, do assault Sadr City, they are unlikely to win a clean victory. The rest of Shia Iraq is likely to explode. A confrontation will convince many Shia that the US never intends to let them rule Iraq despite their success in the elections. The US is already at war with the five million-strong Sunni community and is now fast alienating the Shia. For the first time this year, polls showed that a majority of Shia approve of armed attacks on US-led forces.
An offensive against Sadr's Mehdi Army will be portrayed as an attempt to eliminate militias. But it is, in reality, an attack on one particular militia, because it is anti-American. The Kurdish brigades in the Iraqi army take their orders from the Kurdish leaders and not from Maliki. The US also has good relations with the other Shia militia, the Badr Organisation, which is the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
There is no doubt that the Mehdi Army includes death squads targeting Sunni - but this is also true of Badr.
Sadr first confronted the US when he twice fought the US Army in 2004. Though militarily unsuccessful the fighting established his credibility in his community. He attracted supporters because of the prestige of his family, and his blend of Iraqi nationalism and Shia religion. He is also seen as the voice of the impoverished Shia while Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Hawza, the Shia religious establishment, are more representative of the better-off.
His emergence as one of the most important political figures in Iraq was one of the great surprises after 2003. He is neither eloquent nor particularly charismatic, but he has made very few political mistakes. His swift rise is explained first by his family. He was born in 1974, the third son of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. He is a distant cousin of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr, the Shia revolutionary thinker, who was murdered by Saddam along with his sister in 1980. He had sought to develop a religious response to Marxism and Baathism by advocating a politically and socially activist Islam in contrast to the traditionally quietist Shia religious leaders.
Muqtada's father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, became influential in the 1990s. At first he was given leeway because he was an Iraqi nationalist and opposed to Iranian claims to lead the Shia of Iraq. His sermons began with the words: "No, no to America; no, no to Israel; no, no to the Devil." But it soon became clear he was also opposed to Saddam. He was assassinated by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons in 1999.
Muqtada al-Sadr became so powerful so fast because he was in the same tradition as his relatives. His militiamen are generally not paid and supply their own weapons. They are beginning to have a core of trained, paid professionals but they were never as militarily effective as the Sunni insurgents, many of whom were experienced soldiers.
A US attack on Sadr will open another front in the war in Iraq. It would split the Shia coalition into pro- and anti-American factions. It would disrupt the Shia-Kurdish alliance. It probably would not conciliate the Sunni insurgents.
Sadr's movement thrives on martyrs. The only certain result of an all-out US assault on the Mehdi Army would be to deepen and widen the war in Iraq.
Petraeus: The man charged with defeating the militias
Widely regarded as the last best hope for President George Bush's quest to end sectarian violence in Iraq, Lt-Gen David Petraeus will nonetheless face the challenge of his life in confronting the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Lt-Gen Petraeus, 54, has been appointed by President Bush to take overall military charge of the US campaign in Iraq as soon as he receives his fourth star to become a full general and wins confirmation by the Senate. Already a veteran of two command tours in Iraq, he is also recognised as the US military's leading expert on fighting insurgencies. In 2004, he was in charge of training Iraqi soldiers.
But he was also one of the authors of an armed forces manual which appeared to cast doubt on the strategy that Mr Bush is now pursuing. "The more force used, the less effective it is... The best weapon for counter-insurgency is not to shoot," read the document, which was christened FM3-24.
Some remain sceptical that Lt-Gen Petraeus will fare any better than his predecessors. "Petraeus is being given a losing hand. I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction," said Barry McCaffrey, a retired army general. "The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative... I'm sure he'll say to himself, 'I'm not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone'."
During the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Lt-Gen Petraeus was commander of the 101st Airborne Division which was critical to the taking of Baghdad. He was promoted to commander of the northern Iraq region around Mosul, where a degree of peace was restored.
--
Militias act with impunity, despite US troop surge
It is absurd to speak of men dressed as police as if they were gunmen in disguise
Patrick Cockburn, Thursday, 31 May 2007
The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.
It has always been absurd to speak of men "dressed in police uniforms travelling in police vehicles" as if they were gunmen in disguise. "Of course they have the uniforms and the vehicles, because they are real policemen," said an Iraqi minister after a similar operation in which 150 people were abducted from the Ministry of Higher Education in the capital last year.
The unit that carried out this kidnapping is almost certainly Shia and is probably under the control of the Mehdi Army or the Badr Organisation. The Finance Ministry in East Baghdad is in a heavily Shia district not far from the Oil and Interior Ministries. There are many checkpoints here, so it would be difficult for a detachment of Sunni insurgents to pass undetected.
The motive is political: Commercial kidnappers in Baghdad - numerous, violent and well-organised though they are - have never had the need or capacity to operate on this scale. The raid also shows good intelligence and a carefully worked-out plan to enter and leave the ministry.
The most obvious explanation for the abductions is that they werein retaliation for the killing of Abu Qader, also known as Wissam Wiali, the Mehdi Army commander in Basra, by a British-backed operation last week. It may be designed to send a message that any British action will be met with retaliation.
The other militia units capable of conducting a raid like this are police and police commandos under the control of that Badr Organisation, the military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), whose men still largely run the Interior Ministry. Although it is the Mehdi Army that is invariably singled out for criticism by US and British leaders, the Badr Organisation played a central role in carrying out sectarian killings of Sunnis in 2005 and 2006.
The third suspects in mass abductions against US and British personnel in Iraq are the Iranian-run units that certainly exist. Iranian-inspired retaliatory operations in Iraq appear to have increased since five of their officials were abducted in a US helicopter raid on 11 January on the Kurdish capital of Arbil.
The abductions at the Finance Ministry underline another truth about Iraq. In Arab Iraq, the US and Britain have no allies. For four years the Sunni community has been in rebellion. But the Iraqi Shia only supported the US-led occupation as a means to an end, by which they would legally take power through elections. The Shia do not, at the end of the day, intend to share power with foreign occupiers.
One reason why so many foreign security contractors are employed in Iraq, at vast expense, is that the US, Britain and the Iraqi governments recognise they dare not rely on Iraqis to protect them.
_________________________________________________
From 'mission accomplished' to mission impossible for the Iraqis
Patrick Cockburn - Wednesday, 25 October 2006
"It sounds like a face-saving way of announcing a withdrawal," commented an Iraqi political leader yesterday on hearing that the US military commander in Iraq and the chief American envoy in Baghdad had said that Iraqi police and army should be able to take charge of security in a year or 18 months.
Yet the only real strength of the Iraqi government is the US army. In theory, it has 264,000 soldiers and police under its command. In practice they obey the orders of their communal leaders in so far as they obey anybody.
There is still a hopeless lack of realism in statements from senior American officials. It is as if the taste of defeat is too bitter. "This Mehdi Army militia group has to be brought under control," said the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad at a press conference in Baghdad yesterday. But in the past few months most of the Shia districts in Baghdad - and Shia are the majority in the capital - have come under the control of the Mehdi Army, the militia of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It is all so different from that moment of exuberant imperial hubris in May 2003 when President George Bush announced mission accomplished in Iraq.
Where did the US go wrong? Saddam Hussein's government collapsed almost without a fight. Iraqis would not fight for him. Iraqis may not have welcomed American tanks with sweets and rose petals but they were very glad to see the back of their own disaster-prone leader.
The greatest American mistake was to turn what could have been presented as liberation into an occupation. The US effectively dissolved the Iraqi state. It has since been said by US generals - many of whom now claim to have been opponents of the invasion all along - that given a larger US army and a more competent occupation regime, all might still have been well. This is doubtful. The five million Sunni Arabs were always going to fight the occupation. The only Iraqi community to support it were the five million Kurds. The Shia wanted to use it to gain the power their 60 per cent of the Iraqi population warranted but they never liked it.
One theme has been constant throughout the past three-and-a-half years - the Iraqi government has always been weak. For this, the US and Britain were largely responsible. They wanted an Iraqi government which was strong towards the insurgents but otherwise compliant to what the White House and Downing Street wanted. All Iraqi governments, unelected and elected, have been tainted and de-legitimised by being dependent on the US. This is as true of the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today as it was when sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq under the prime minister Iyad Allawi in June 2004. Real authority had remained in the hands of the US. The result was a government whose ministers could not move outside the Green Zone. They showed great enthusiasm for press conferences abroad where they breathed defiance at the insurgents and agreed with everything said by Mr Bush or Tony Blair.
The government can do nothing because it only came into existence after ministries were divided up between the political parties after prolonged negotiations. Each ministry is a bastion of that party, a source of jobs and money. The government can implement no policy because of these deep divisions. The government cannot turn on the militias because they are too strong.
It is also true that almost all parties that make up the government have their own militias: the Kurds have the Peshmerga; the Shia have the Mehdi Army and the Badr Organisation; the Sunni have the insurgents. In areas of Iraq where civil war is already raging or where it is impending, people look to these militias to defend their homes and not to the police or regular army.
The US has lost more than 500 of its soldiers, dead and wounded, this month. Every month this year the combined figure - more telling than that for dead alone - has been creeping up, as the area of US control is diminishing. The handover of security to Iraqi government forces - the long-trumpeted aim of American and British policy - is, in practice, a handover to the local militias.
The problem for the US and British is that many Iraqi leaders outside the government think the British and Americans are on the run. Wait, they say, and they will become even weaker. The US is talking to senior Baath party military officials in Saudi Arabia and Jordan who control the insurgency if anybody does. But it is unlikely that they would call a ceasefire except on terms wholly unacceptable to other Iraqis.
Can the US extract itself from Iraq? Probably it could but only with great loss of face which the present administration could not endure after its boasts of victory three-and-a-half years ago.
Further reading:
"The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq" by Patrick Cockburn.
--
US in Iraq: We're out of here
America signals dramatic shift in strategy, saying Iraq will assume responsibility for security in '12 to 18 months'
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington and Colin Brown
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
In the firmest indication yet of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, America's most senior general there and its top civilian official have drawn the outlines of a political and military plan that could see a substantial pullout of US troops within 12 to 18 months.
Yesterday's announcement looked like a strategy change carrying implications for British troops in Iraq, although President Bush's aides deny any "dramatic shifts" in policy. It came after Mr Bush's spokesman acknowledged on Monday that the President had cut and run from his signature promise that America would "stay the course" in Iraq. The White House formally abandoned Mr Bush's previous "stay the course" formulation for US policy.
Leading members of Mr Bush's own Republican party are demanding a radical rethink of US strategy in Iraq. They argue that current policies have all but failed, as sectarian and anti-American violence threaten to overwhelm the country.
Pressures for a significant pull-out much sooner are intensifying. Iraq threatens to drag Republicans to humiliating defeat at the 7 November elections, while Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has become the latest senior Republican to turn on the White House. He said yesterday: "We're on the verge of chaos."
A poll shows more than two-thirds of Americans think the war was a mistake. A mere 20 per cent believe the US is winning, compared to 40 per cent 12 months ago. In an editorial yesterday, The New York Times said Iraq could become "the worst foreign policy debacle in American history".
A changing message
'The US and our allies have prevailed. Now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country'
President Bush, 1 May 2003
'We must stay the course, because the end result is in our interest'
President Bush, 13 April 2004
'This is not "stay the course" but constant motion '
Bush spokesman, 23 October 2004
'This violence is going to go on for a long time'
Stephen Hadley, US National Security Adviser, yesterday
--
NY Times extract: 'No one wants to tell the bitter truth'
This is an edited extract from an editorial in yesterday's 'New York Times'
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
No matter what President Bush says, the question is not whether America can win in Iraq. The only question is whether the United States can extricate itself without leaving behind an unending civil war that will spread more chaos and suffering throughout the Middle East, while spawning terrorism across the globe.
--
Al Sadr: The man who now holds Iraq's future in his hands
Patrick Cockburn, Thursday, 11 January 2007
He is a strange figure to be targeted as the number one enemy of the US in Iraq. Four years ago, few had heard of the Shia nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr inside or outside Iraq. Even somebody as suspicious as Saddam Hussein, who murdered his father and two brothers, did not think he would play any role in the coming crisis.
Now he holds the future of Iraq in his hands. He has far more popularity and legitimacy than many of the pro-American Iraqi leaders cowering in the Green Zone. He is seen by millions of Shia in Baghdad and across southern Iraq as their spiritual and national leader. Rightly or wrongly, he is feared by Sunnis as their nemesis, a physical symbol that they are battling for their existence in Iraq.
He has now become part of the White House's demonology in Iraq. At one time the US believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for all its problems in Iraq - problems that would be resolved once he was overthrown. Today Sadr, a 32-year-old cleric in his black robe with fierce, staring, dark eyes, is denounced as the fomenter of sectarian warfare.
Many Iraqi leaders never leave the Green Zone. Sadr has never entered it. He has a cult-like following. He controls Sadr City, the ramshackle, sprawling slum in east Baghdad which is home to two-and-a-half million Shia, important cities such as Kufa and provinces such as Maysan. He can probably put 100,000 armed militiamen into the field. Much of the Baghdad police force follows him. Army barracks where Shia units are stationed have pictures of him pinned to the walls.
Once in 2004 he was wanted "dead or alive" by the US forces and dismissed as "a firebrand". They soon found that his movement had deep roots. He controls 32 out of 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament. He is the most important ally of the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. In 2004, the US and its former exile allies paid a heavy price for trying to exclude him from power. In 2005 and 2006, they recognised his strength. He became part of the political process in Iraq while opposing the US-led occupation.
Now, astonishingly the US may be about to confront Sadr and his powerful social and political movement. This could lead almost immediately to a crisis for the US and President Bush's new strategy for Iraq.
If the US Army, along with Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi army, do assault Sadr City, they are unlikely to win a clean victory. The rest of Shia Iraq is likely to explode. A confrontation will convince many Shia that the US never intends to let them rule Iraq despite their success in the elections. The US is already at war with the five million-strong Sunni community and is now fast alienating the Shia. For the first time this year, polls showed that a majority of Shia approve of armed attacks on US-led forces.
An offensive against Sadr's Mehdi Army will be portrayed as an attempt to eliminate militias. But it is, in reality, an attack on one particular militia, because it is anti-American. The Kurdish brigades in the Iraqi army take their orders from the Kurdish leaders and not from Maliki. The US also has good relations with the other Shia militia, the Badr Organisation, which is the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
There is no doubt that the Mehdi Army includes death squads targeting Sunni - but this is also true of Badr.
Sadr first confronted the US when he twice fought the US Army in 2004. Though militarily unsuccessful the fighting established his credibility in his community. He attracted supporters because of the prestige of his family, and his blend of Iraqi nationalism and Shia religion. He is also seen as the voice of the impoverished Shia while Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Hawza, the Shia religious establishment, are more representative of the better-off.
His emergence as one of the most important political figures in Iraq was one of the great surprises after 2003. He is neither eloquent nor particularly charismatic, but he has made very few political mistakes. His swift rise is explained first by his family. He was born in 1974, the third son of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. He is a distant cousin of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr, the Shia revolutionary thinker, who was murdered by Saddam along with his sister in 1980. He had sought to develop a religious response to Marxism and Baathism by advocating a politically and socially activist Islam in contrast to the traditionally quietist Shia religious leaders.
Muqtada's father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, became influential in the 1990s. At first he was given leeway because he was an Iraqi nationalist and opposed to Iranian claims to lead the Shia of Iraq. His sermons began with the words: "No, no to America; no, no to Israel; no, no to the Devil." But it soon became clear he was also opposed to Saddam. He was assassinated by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons in 1999.
Muqtada al-Sadr became so powerful so fast because he was in the same tradition as his relatives. His militiamen are generally not paid and supply their own weapons. They are beginning to have a core of trained, paid professionals but they were never as militarily effective as the Sunni insurgents, many of whom were experienced soldiers.
A US attack on Sadr will open another front in the war in Iraq. It would split the Shia coalition into pro- and anti-American factions. It would disrupt the Shia-Kurdish alliance. It probably would not conciliate the Sunni insurgents.
Sadr's movement thrives on martyrs. The only certain result of an all-out US assault on the Mehdi Army would be to deepen and widen the war in Iraq.
Petraeus: The man charged with defeating the militias
Widely regarded as the last best hope for President George Bush's quest to end sectarian violence in Iraq, Lt-Gen David Petraeus will nonetheless face the challenge of his life in confronting the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Lt-Gen Petraeus, 54, has been appointed by President Bush to take overall military charge of the US campaign in Iraq as soon as he receives his fourth star to become a full general and wins confirmation by the Senate. Already a veteran of two command tours in Iraq, he is also recognised as the US military's leading expert on fighting insurgencies. In 2004, he was in charge of training Iraqi soldiers.
But he was also one of the authors of an armed forces manual which appeared to cast doubt on the strategy that Mr Bush is now pursuing. "The more force used, the less effective it is... The best weapon for counter-insurgency is not to shoot," read the document, which was christened FM3-24.
Some remain sceptical that Lt-Gen Petraeus will fare any better than his predecessors. "Petraeus is being given a losing hand. I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction," said Barry McCaffrey, a retired army general. "The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative... I'm sure he'll say to himself, 'I'm not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone'."
During the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Lt-Gen Petraeus was commander of the 101st Airborne Division which was critical to the taking of Baghdad. He was promoted to commander of the northern Iraq region around Mosul, where a degree of peace was restored.
--
Militias act with impunity, despite US troop surge
It is absurd to speak of men dressed as police as if they were gunmen in disguise
Patrick Cockburn, Thursday, 31 May 2007
The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.
It has always been absurd to speak of men "dressed in police uniforms travelling in police vehicles" as if they were gunmen in disguise. "Of course they have the uniforms and the vehicles, because they are real policemen," said an Iraqi minister after a similar operation in which 150 people were abducted from the Ministry of Higher Education in the capital last year.
The unit that carried out this kidnapping is almost certainly Shia and is probably under the control of the Mehdi Army or the Badr Organisation. The Finance Ministry in East Baghdad is in a heavily Shia district not far from the Oil and Interior Ministries. There are many checkpoints here, so it would be difficult for a detachment of Sunni insurgents to pass undetected.
The motive is political: Commercial kidnappers in Baghdad - numerous, violent and well-organised though they are - have never had the need or capacity to operate on this scale. The raid also shows good intelligence and a carefully worked-out plan to enter and leave the ministry.
The most obvious explanation for the abductions is that they werein retaliation for the killing of Abu Qader, also known as Wissam Wiali, the Mehdi Army commander in Basra, by a British-backed operation last week. It may be designed to send a message that any British action will be met with retaliation.
The other militia units capable of conducting a raid like this are police and police commandos under the control of that Badr Organisation, the military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), whose men still largely run the Interior Ministry. Although it is the Mehdi Army that is invariably singled out for criticism by US and British leaders, the Badr Organisation played a central role in carrying out sectarian killings of Sunnis in 2005 and 2006.
The third suspects in mass abductions against US and British personnel in Iraq are the Iranian-run units that certainly exist. Iranian-inspired retaliatory operations in Iraq appear to have increased since five of their officials were abducted in a US helicopter raid on 11 January on the Kurdish capital of Arbil.
The abductions at the Finance Ministry underline another truth about Iraq. In Arab Iraq, the US and Britain have no allies. For four years the Sunni community has been in rebellion. But the Iraqi Shia only supported the US-led occupation as a means to an end, by which they would legally take power through elections. The Shia do not, at the end of the day, intend to share power with foreign occupiers.
One reason why so many foreign security contractors are employed in Iraq, at vast expense, is that the US, Britain and the Iraqi governments recognise they dare not rely on Iraqis to protect them.
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