The Silence Of The Clerics»

Al Jazeera reports that “an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr has lashed out at Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, for keeping silent over clashes that have killed hundreds in Baghdad”:

Speaking at Friday prayers, Sheikh Sattar Battat, an aide to al-Sadr, said he was “surprised” that al-Sistani had failed to condemn the violence.

“We are surprised by the silence in Najaf where the highest Shiite religious authority is based,” he said, referring to al-Sistani.

For 50 days Sadr City is being bombed … Children, women and old people are being killed by all kinds of US weapons, and Najaf remains silent.”

Battat said the al-Sadr movement has not seen any “reaction or fatwa [religious decree] from Najaf” criticising the government assault on Shia fighters in Sadr City.

“For us this means that Najaf accepts the massacre in Sadr City,” he said.

Much of Muqtada al-Sadr’s legitimacy is based on the legacy of his father, Grand Ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr, who built his movement in the 1990s among Iraq’s poorest Shia, and was assassinated by Saddam’s regime in 1999.

One of the central elements of the elder Sadr’s program (and now of Muqtada’s) was a distinction between the “silent clerics” (represented by Sistani and the Najaf establishment) — bookish sorts who stay remote from the lives of their people — and the “speaking clerics” who take part in the suffering and struggle of the Shia, as Sadeq did. And here the “silent clerics” once again stayed silent while Shia were crushed in Sadr City, of all places, while medical care, food, and shelter are being doled out in Muqtada’s name. It doesn’t require any math to see that Sadr benefits politically from this.

‘Special Groups’: A ‘Useful Fiction’»

In a story on the continuing fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, the LA Times reports that “the U.S. military has tied itself into a verbal knot as it tries to avoid further inflaming tensions with Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr while confronting members of his Mahdi Army militia.”

U.S. forces battle almost daily with Shiite militiamen in Sadr City, including Sadr loyalists, but commanders are careful to avoid blaming the Mahdi Army for the violence. […]

The military still insists that Sadr’s Mahdi Army is not its main problem, saying it is “special groups” that have broken away from Sadr’s control. Those groups are trained and armed by Iran and not bound by Sadr’s directives.

However, military officials acknowledge that mainstream Mahdi Army elements took part in the initial fighting that erupted March 25 against an offensive launched by U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces.

Abu Muqawama’s Dr. iRack notes rightly that “the notion of ’special groups’– JAM factions that supposedly have close ties to Iran’s Quds force –is, in many respects, a useful fiction,” as it allows U.S. forces to move against elements of Sadr’s militia without appearing to directly challenge Sadr’s wider political movement, which is the largest in Iraq. But, as iRack notes, the U.S. military has “made a habit of describing all JAMsters who violate the ‘freeze’ on armed activities declared by Moqtada al-Sadr last August as ’special groups.’ ”

[This] creates a false impression that the majority of JAMsters fighting U.S. forces take their orders directly from the mullahs in Iran (much as the use of the label “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as a catch all term for a disparate and very loosely aligned collection Sunni insurgent groups creates the false impression that most Sunni insurgents take their orders from Bin Laden or the foreign leadership of AQI).

The Bush administration has consistently tried to blame outside actors for violence in Iraq in order to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that the U.S. occupation is opposed by a substantial majority of the population who the U.S. is ostensibly there to support. In seeking to defend a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, the administration and its supporters have drawn a deeply distorted picture of the political struggles currently taking place within various Iraqi communities.

In this podcast, New York Times reporters Alissa Rubin and Stephen Farrell discuss the situation on the ground in Sadr City. Farrell characterizes the current fighting as part of an intra-Shia struggle between “the haves and have nots, the establishment and outsiders.”

You have the people who rule the street and the people who run the government. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Iraqis who would wholeheartedly side with the idea that somehow the official democratic clean honest wonderful government is bringing law and order to an undisciplined rabble. I think most people, certainly most Sunnis that you talk to, would see this as a fight between a militia [ISCI/Badr] which happens to have turned itself into the government army and a militia [Sadr’s Mahdi Army] which hasn’t. The insiders and the outsiders.

Since very early in the occupation of Iraq, the United States has been willing to work with ISCI because it was willing to work with the U.S. That is, they recognized, for the moment, the authority of the U.S. occupation. The Sadrists did not, which resulted in the U.S.’s freezing them out of a political process which the Sadrists in any case viewed as illegitimate. This allowed ISCI to establish itself within the Iraqi government to a far greater extent than its relatively small political base could reasonably justify, and to incorporate large numbers of its (Iranian trained and supported) militia into the security services.

To put it simply, the U.S. is opposing Sadr because he opposes the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. is supporting ISCI because ISCI supports the occupation. As Brian Katulis and I noted in an op-ed several weeks ago, the irony of this strategy is that it has allied the United States with Iran’s primary proxy in the Iraqi government, against what is arguably the most potent nationalist political force in the country.

Rice: ‘Badr Has Decided To Be An Organization, Not A Militia’»

During a press conference in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked Iraq Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr for issuing threats from Iran (unlike Rice’s bosses, who bravely issue threats from the trenches of Washington, DC), Secretary Rice and Ambassador Crocker were asked about distinctions between a militia like the Badr Organization, the militia wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), and Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Here’s what was said:

QUESTION: What is the distinction that all of you make between groups like the Badr Organization, which his for all intents a militia and in the past has been involved in events here that have been troublesome, even in 2005, 2006, not at the same level as the Jaish al-Mahdi, but clearly involved? So what’s the distinction you make between the Badr Organization? Why are they now different to the Jaish al-Mahdi?

AMBASSADOR CROCKER: The Badr organization made the choice a while back that they were going to step away from a militia identity and move into politics. That’s why it’s the Badr Organization. It used to be the Badr Brigades. They have opted to be, again, part of mainstream politics here. That’s the choice that’s now in front of the Sadr movement.

QUESTION: When would you say that they really changed to that? Because in 2005, there was the Jadriya bunker incident which was clearly linked to the –

SECRETARY RICE: We’re three years past that. And –

QUESTION: So when was the transition? In 2007, there was a case of a member of the Badr Organization threatening Hussein Kamal when he was here –

SECRETARY RICE: Look, I don’t think you can say that there won ‘t be an individual here or there who may break this — that decision to move in that direction. But Badr as an organization has decided to be an organization, not to be a militia.

Okay, glad we got that cleared up. The Badr are no longer considered a “militia” because they have decided to redefine themselves as “not a militia,” and the U.S. is apparently satisfied with this. Now, if only Muqtada al-Sadr would cease his opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and get on board with the U.S.’s plans to use his country as a base from which to project power throughout the Middle East, he would be amazed at how fast the U.S. would be willing to redefine his militia in a similar fashion.

The truth is that, despite this transparent attempt to redefine these militias in a way that reflects “progress” in Iraq, they remain militias. Badr and Da’wa militiamen have been incorporated into the “Iraqi army” in Baghdad and southern Iraq, just as units of the Kurdish peshmerga have been incorporated into the “Iraqi army” in Kurdistan, but despite the new uniforms, these fighters remain loyal to, and continue to commit violence on behalf of, the political factions with which they originated. This is what is known as “success” in Surgeland.

McClatchy News Service Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel was interviewed on Bill Moyers’ program last Friday, and explained how silly these word games are.

Watch it:

Transcript below: Read the rest of this entry »

Explaining The Sadr Surge»

With U.S. forces joining the fight against the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, the Bush administration’s current Iraq policy is to back the Iraqi political faction (led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim) most closely allied to Iran against the faction of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr’s nationalist credentials have proved a difficult hurdle for former exiles Maliki and Hakim, and their parties haven’t been able to establish much political support in Iraq both because of the Iraqi government’s continuing corruption and failure to deliver basic services, and because they are seen as puppets either of Iran or the U.S., or both. The U.S. likes them, though, because they bless the U.S. presence in Iraq. And the U.S. dislikes Sadr because he has, since the 2003 invasion, consistently demanded a U.S. withdrawal.

As to why the Maliki government decided that now was the time to go against Sadr’s loyalists, it might have something to do with Dick Cheney’s visit to Iraq a few weeks ago. Here’s why:

On February 13, after a long, bitter debate, the Iraqi parliament passed a package of three laws dealing with the budget, amnesty for detainees, and a provincial powers law that “paved the way for elections in October.” The legislation was hailed in the U.S. media as a major political breakthrough.

On February 27, Iraq’s three-man presidency council then vetoed the provincial powers legislation, putting a serious crimp in the “political progress” narrative. The person who insisted on the veto was Shia Vice President Abdul Mehdi, a member of ISCI, because his party understood that they were/are not yet in a position to defeat the Sadrists (or Fadhila, a Sadrist offshoot powerful in and around Basra) in elections, and stood to lose big.

On March 17, Cheney made a surprise visit to Iraq, meeting with Maliki and Hakim and stressing political unity.

On March 21, the presidential council reversed its veto of the provincial powers law.

On March 25, Iraqi forces begin moving against Mahdi Army elements in Basra.

Given Maliki’s dependence on the U.S. for the survival of his government, I’m skeptical of claims by the Bush administration that “Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting” them. At the risk of offering a conspiracy theory, it’s very possible that, in exchange for withdrawing the veto and giving Bush something which he could present to Americans as “progress in Iraq,” Cheney gave a nod to Maliki and his ISCI allies to try to get by force what they knew they could not get by ballot: Victory against the Sadrists.

That’s not working out so well. The last four days of intense fighting have shown just how tenuous were the successes of the surge, and how dependent these successes were upon the willingness and ability of Muqtada al-Sadr to keep his movement in check.

A February report by the International Crisis Group correctly predicted this outcome:

The U.S. response [to Sadr’s cease-fire]– to continue attacking and arresting Sadrist militants, including some who are not militia members; arm a Shiite tribal counterforce in the south to roll back Sadrist territorial gains; and throw its lot in with Muqtada’s nemesis, ISCI – is understandable but short-sighted. The Sadrist movement, its present difficulties aside, remains a deeply entrenched, popular mass movement of young, poor and disenfranchised Shiites. It still controls key areas of the capital, as well as several southern cities; even now, its principal strongholds are virtually unassailable. Despite intensified U.S. military operations and stepped up Iraqi involvement, it is fanciful to expect the Mahdi Army’s defeat. Instead, heightened pressure is likely to trigger both fierce Sadrist resistance in Baghdad and an escalating intra-Shiite civil war in the south.

Despite Bush’s praise for Prime Minister Maliki’s “bold decision…to go after the illegal groups in Basra,” presenting this as “the Iraqi government against sectarian militias,” is wrong. This is another episode in an intra-sectarian conflict that has gone on since 2003, with different Shiite militias competing for the spoils on behalf their respective political machines.

As Eric Martin points out, despite Maliki’s claim that his goal is to rid Basra of militias, Iraqi security forces have focused on one militia: The Mahdi Army. ISCI’s militia, the Badr Organization, (which was founded in Iran and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) has largely incorporated itself into the Iraqi Security Forces, and has elements acting independently as well as under the aegis of the Iraqi state, both of which are fighting together in Basra against the Mahdi Army. This is clearly a(nother) misguided attempt to crush Sadr, and, it seems likely that, as in previous episodes, he will win simply by not losing.

UPDATE: Ilan Goldenberg is skeptical of the Cheney Theory, pointing to the Washington Post’s note that “Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials.” Ilan writes:

Still, the reason I don’t buy this theory is that the timing makes no sense whatsoever from a domestic political perspective. If there was a quid pro quo, the Bush Administration would have asked for a waiting period until after the Petraeus Crocker testimony. Why go with such a high risk operation a week before the progress report to Congress? Makes no sense. This Administration is pretty incompetent about a lot of things, but for the most part they seem to understand political timing.

Eric Martin is skeptical of Goldenberg’s skepticism and writes:

It is…entirely possible that the adminstration official quoted in the article was telling the truth…as she/he knew it. There has been a perculiar pattern of secrecy within the Bush administration (not just vis-a-vis outsiders) such that the Secretary of State might be pursuing some policy without telling the Secretary of Defense or Vice President, and vice versa (with the POTUS included on a need to know basis - which is rarer than it should be).