Forced to fight renegades

This offensive doesn’t appear to be well thought out at all. If the goal was to mop up rogue elements of JAM why did they start going after Sadr loyalists?, and if the goal was to go after JAM and Sadr, why now, when there’s still a ceasefire and a chance of reconciliation?

This might be Maliki thinking to strike while the iron is hot and before the US starts scaling down its presence, but you’d think the US would have put the kibosh on it if the gameplan was to palm Iraq off to the next administration.

Baffling stuff.

Leinad @ #2:

Baffling stuff yes, but hardly surprising:

This offensive doesn’t appear to be well thought out at all. If the goal was to mop up rogue elements of JAM Al Qaeda, why did they start going after Sadr loyalists Saddam? And…why now, when there’s still a ceasefire inspections process underway and a chance of reconciliation peaceful resolution?

As you note, it would have made sense for the US to knock this on the head, but the current US administration does not make sense. This is just par for the course behaviour.

The bafflement continues. Today McCain gave a foreign policy speech in which the goal posts were moved away from averting civil war (oops!) to preventing GENOCIDE! Note that there has never previously been a threat of genocide in Iraq, but America has brought new possibilities to that nation.

Another baffling development was the discovery of “special groups.” Thise is a new kind of Iraqi enemy that is generically labelled for fear of giving offense to people we would rather not be fighting in larger numbers. It is reminiscent of “Catch 22” and the Special Services unit. Perhaps we can use American Special Services to defeat the Iraqi Special Groups. Wouldn’t that be special.

They like “renegade” because the term “maverick”, which could also be used, is reserved for John McCain.

And it was only a couple of days ago that Fred Kagan was boasting at AEI that JAM would never dare take on the Iraqi army with the US still around, because they’d get wiped out so quickly.

[crossposted, with a few minor changes in this version, from comments at “The Yorkshire Ranter”]

I’m not sure I believe in this concept of a “Sadr movement” and in particular, I don’t believe that the people calling themselves the Mehdi Army in Basra have all that much in common with the inhabitants of Sadr City or the hardcore fighters in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr became a brand name early in the war as the only real focus for non-Ba’athist nationalist resistance, and as a result the rather strange coalition that built up around the time of the siege of Najaf (which included a couple of British guerilla-tourists who really clearly didn’t know what they were doing there) has never really made much sense as a political entity.

As a result, if I were M al-S, I’d have been worrying for quite some time that the Basra branch was a loose cannon almost bound to end up as an embarrassment. And when you think about it, they’re very vulnerable to a squeeze there as they have much less of a political base than anyone else and no allies. I think that they do end up getting squashed.

But something like this had to happen; the alternative was that Maliki just sat around running the clock out on the surge before getting on the wrong end of a coup, with even more disastrous results. It’s a good sign that he is willing and able to order the Iraqi Army to do anything offensive; agreed that this is good in the sense that out of our two chances, Slim hasn’t quite reached the town boundaries yet, but something had to happen. This isn’t contrarianism and I don’t see why it’s annoying.

Or to put it more simply, I think that the attack on Basra has to be seen as analogous to directors buying stock in their own company – it doesn’t change anything in and of itself, but as an indication of the subjective assessment of people in the middle of things, it’s a piece of information that a smart chap doesn’t ignore (viz, the HBOS directors putting in more or less their entire bonuses last week; otoh, Bernie Ebbers was buying Worldcom stock all the way down so it’s not a perfect indicator).

If al-Maliki really does believe that he can do this on his own, that’s something very interesting, because he’s potentially a lot better placed to make that call than I am. On the other hand, maybe I’ve overestimated him and that old Saddam-era type that’s running the operation – it’s of course always possible that they’re doing the typical American client tactic of trying to cause a disaster so big that daddy has to step in and bail them out. In which case, of course, we’re in the shit. But it does strike me as worth a punt at the right odds; in punditry terms as in the market, you never get rich by backing the favourite in every race.

ISCI/Dawa were on track to get wiped off the ballots by the Sadrists whenever the provincial elections were called, which probably figured heavily in the decision, but I can’t really see a series of street battles no matter how successful ‘marginalising’ the Sadrists before the elections. Instead I can easily see this dragging on for weeks and entrenching factional grudges even futher.

What is this Al-Sadr movement, anyway? Nationalist? Sectarian? Populist-demagoguery? Personality cult? Class-based (wiki: “Al-Sistani is said by observers to draw support from established, property-owning Shi’ites, while Muqtada al-Sadr’s support is strongest among the uneducated urban poor, many of whom see him as their champion“)? Something else? Combination of things?

I haven’t seen any convincing analysis so far.

Well, yes…I had hoped that after all the thousands of words I’ve spent on this point since March 2004, at least my readers would have got the point that the Sadrists control *our MSR* and *the southern oil system*, or rather, they are permanently in a position to disrupt same. This is an artefact of geography and demography; the permanently operating factors, as they used to say in the Soviet General Staff.

…the Iraqi Prime Minister hasn’t taken into account the Napoleonic maxim….

If Maliki was any kind of Napoleon we would have had a Brumaire long before now.

the Sadrists control our MSR and the southern oil system, or rather, they are permanently in a position to disrupt same

“control” and “permanently in a position to disrupt” is the same thing in military terms but not at all the same thing in political terms though, isn’t it?

That would be “the Mahdi Army gave us a demonstration”. Moqtada al-Sadr is still claiming to be maintaining a ceasefire and instructing his followers to only shoot in self-defence.

What is this Al-Sadr movement, anyway? Nationalist? Sectarian? Populist-demagoguery? Personality cult? Class-based? Something else? Combination of things?

Abb1 is asking the right question.

One might wonder the same about some of the other players here, like Maliki. That Visser article suggests that his base is in the security services, putting him in the centralist camp compared with other Shia parties. Which makes sense, but making sense isn’t the same as being true.

But honestly? Just typing the above makes me feel ridiculous. None of us should put any confidence in our analysis of Iraqi politics; the US government certainly doesn’t have any grasp on it. Which is why I think that Daniel’s position that the US could have won in Vietnam, and could still win in Iraq, if it just picked the right proxies, is hopeless. It’s the proxies doing the picking.

Nationalist?

Yes, violently hostile to Iran and Iranians, unfriendly to the US and the green zonies.

Sectarian?

Yes. Shi’ite till I die. But see point 1; has more common ground with the Sunnis than ISIC.

Populist-demagoguery?

Yes, furious demands for the Americans out, the government down, and the oil revenues south.

Personality cult?

It’s named after its leader.

Class-based?

Yes, the local branches are often hardly distinguishable from “Frankie Says: Arm The Unemployed” for real.

OK, then, it’s named after its leader’s assassinated dad. You think that’s less of a personality cult?

The name must surely be after Moqtada rather than his dad – al-Sadr senior was a beloved populist cleric, but the Mahdi Army that fought in Najaf was a personal militia of Moqtada’s – there wasn’t a pre-existing “Sadrist” political movement that he just stepped into.

Alex, all this seems rather contradictory (and it’s clear from your comment that you see it too): Shi’ite till I die and hostile to Iran? Islamist and class-based and nationalist too? I dunno, seem difficult to reconcile. Either he is just an opportunistic demagogue or there must be some angle there we can’t quite identify yet.

Abb1, it’s because those identities overlap. If you’re Shia, you’re probably poor, and probably southern, either now or in the past, and if this is the case the Iranians probably shelled the shit out of your home town in 1980-1988. You’ve got the complete Sadrist deck of grievances right there.

Re: 37

The American people have not rejected this war in anything but opinion polls. There are no large demonstrations against the war, and tens of thousands of immoral and impecunious young Americans continue to enlist to fight in a brutal neo-colonial occupation each year. It’s not just Bush. We Americans are all responsible for this awful crime.

35: my whole point is that the Basra Mahdi Army is something which can and probably should be lopped off in the general interests of stability in Iraq, and that its relationship to the Sadr Movement faction in the Iraqi parliament isn’t one such that doing so would totally undermine the legitimacy of Iraqi politics. I would actually not be too surprised if the outcome of M-al-S’s negotiations with Maliki is to formally disassociate himself (Obama-style) from the gangs in Basra.

Actually the outcome which appears to be occurring right now is Maliki’s gang getting its clock cleaned but good, in Baghdad as well as Basra. Will be interesting to hear how Petraeus manages to spin this as another “positive outcome of the surge”.

what are the alternatives here?

Well, one alternative as far as you or I are concerned, is that when you don’t know, you say, “I don’t know.”

The situation in Basra was intolerable before as well; there was no sort of stability and it was a gangster-state.

If there’s one point you have consistently (and rightly) made in other contexts, it’s that no matter how bad a situation is, that’s not, in itself, an argument to just do something.

If there’s one point you have consistently (and rightly) made in other contexts, it’s that no matter how bad a situation is, that’s not, in itself, an argument to just do something.

Okay, at this point there are a whole bunch of troops in Iraq. I accept that you and I have no idea what to do and it seems obvious that the Bush administration has no idea what to do.

Beyond whether or not we can credibly imagine solutions to the debacle, should we vote for a candidate that will do nothing – that is maintaining the current position – or something?

I actually think that there’s a duty to at least try to form opinions on those subjects; hence my assessment that a) any way out of the corner we are in would have to involve Maliki being stabilised as monopolist on the use of violence b) that it would therefore involve his “stepping up” and taking responsibility for security in Iraq himself – this was after all the whole success-criterion for the surge and the measure of its apparent failure up to now and c) that the Basra attack would be a positive milestone on this path.

On the other hand, it is looking pretty bad for this case at the moment, as rioting and violence have broken out in a lot of other towns – I had clearly overestimated the extent to which the Basra Mahdi Army was separable from the rest of the Sadrist movement, an/or the extent to which it would keep stood down on the instructions of Moqtada. To continue the stock market analogy above, this is getting to the point at which my mental stop-loss order kicks in. It’s very much beginning to look like John was right in guessing that this was a silly, desperate gamble on the part of Maliki (or if it’s being-charitable-to-me day, a sensible gamble that didn’t work out), and that it’s going to end up fatally weakening him, with fairly disastrous consequences.

I may have failed to observe the old proverb of London Business School “not all problems have solutions” and have been looking for ways out of a hole which in fact had no way out.

Kevin Donoghue: “My feeling is that in a religion which places as much stress on martyrdom as Shiism does, you don’t really rate until you’re dead.”

Umm… Ayatollah Khomeini during his life? Shaykh Hasan Nasrallah now? Al-Sadr indeed does have a great deal of respect because of the family connection, because of his fighting in Najaf against the US, because of the fact that when the US was destroying Falluja, he sent medicine and food and called for the Shi’a to support the Sunnis being starved and slaughtered there, and because he is at once a nationalist and a Shi’a (nowhere as eloquent or even enlightened as Lebanon’s Nasrallah, but like him he can marry those two identities).

Alex: “If you’re Shia, you’re probably poor, and probably southern, either now or in the past, and if this is the case the Iranians probably shelled the shit out of your home town in 1980-1988.”

Not necessarily. The established Shi’a communities of the South and the more middle-class neighbourhoods of Baghdad are well-to-do, educated etc. In mid-twentieth century, they also formed the backbone of the Iraqi Communist Party. Sadr City is a slum that emerged after mass migration of the Shi’a from the south. It is a poor neighbourhood and the true base of Sadr’s movement.

abb1: “Shi’ite till I die and hostile to Iran? Islamist and class-based and nationalist too?”

Yes. Amazingly, many Iraqi (and indeed Lebanese) Shi’a have no affection for Iran. Politics wins over sectarian identities. As for “Islamist and class-based and nationalist” all together, please see Hizbullah of Lebanon, or Iran’s Mojahedin-e-Khalq before they became crazy and sold themselves out to Saddam Hussain (circa early-1980s).

Alex, there is a significant portion of the population of country who live in the South, are Shi’a and are not poor.

Can anyone recommend a news link? I usually don’t follow stories closely but this one seems pretty critical.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s do or die for Maliki and Sadr both, and Sadr’s chances mostly lie in creating widespread disruption (away from Basra).

You have to assume that Cheney approved the attacks, if he didn’t initiate them.

Should we expect the US to get involved, perhaps with carpet-bombing or something?

I’m out of character today because I really don’t pretend to know anything at the moment.

If this is what it looks like, I hope to God that both Democrats pin it on Cheney.

Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra. His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for.

Here’s Marc Lynch, linking to a number of thoughts/possibilities, including the Reidar Visser piece I linked to yesterday, and to this “prescient analysis” (dated Feb 7th.) by the International Crisis Group.

And US forces are already involved. If you’d follow the links I gave days ago [weeks and months ago since they’re to sites I read every day], you wouldn’t have to ask such questions. Arab Links, Conficts Forum, Conflicts Blotter, Helena Cobban, Marc Lynch, Joshua Landis on Syria, and even an actual a-rab or two. As’ad AbuKhalil? Did any of you watch Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose?
How many of you will go on having opinions without bothering to find someone who knows something? Is there any subject other than Arabic where one person’s interpretations carry so much weight in the “liberal” pundits web? Is Juan Cole your hero? Read some of the others and you may change your mind.

Thank you Laleh.

Well, credit where due, the Lynch post Seth links to does a good job laying out the many unknowns.

Which only reinforces my view that if one is going to engage with the Iraq question politically, support some policy there or describe developments as good or bad, it had better be a judgment that will be valid in any of the most plausible scenarios. For my money, “US out now!” still is, but anything more nuanced? probably not.

Re: 65

Genocide means the targeting and destruction of a large group of people. Saddam’s terrible regime did kill large numbers of people, but never sought to exterminate a particular group. The Marsh Arabs suffered terrible reprisals for their revolt, but they were not exterminated. It is likely that the total fatalities resulting from the US occupation now exceed the highest estimates of deaths caused by Saddam, and the killing caused by the occupation continues.

It is a matter of record that many of Saddam’s evil deeds occurred while he was an ally of the United States. Similarly, the US has provided support to several regimes that have conducted massacres (e.g., Suharto in Indonesia). Thus, the claim that the US invades other nations to avert mass killings is highly suspect.

Nations lie to conceal disreputable motives. America lied about its invasion of Iraq because it was motivated by neo-Imperial aggression. The cover story has changed from WMD, to implanting democracy, to fighting Al Qaeda, to averting civil war, to averting genocide. The only constants are our steady construction of permanent bases and complete control of Iraq’s oil. How much plainer can the truth be?

What will the next cover story be? Averting the Apocalypse?

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. However, instead of being a brutal religious dictator (like the Taliban/al Qaeda in Afghanistan, most Wahibbists in Saudi Arabia, and certain ayatollahs in Iran) he was a brutal secular dictator, who reportedly admired another brutal secular dictator, Josef Stalin.

So, being a brutal secular dictator, Saddam Hussein kept the brutal religious dictators at bay in Iraq, using brutal measures (similar to those the Bush administration has employed against al Qaeda). Many of Iraq’s brutal religious dictators, though, bided their time, with an occasional uprising against Hussein and the Baathists being crushed, while every now and then trying to assassinate Hussein and his sons.

Then, Bush and Cheney ordered Iraq attacked, Saddam Hussein was captured and killed, and all the Sunni Baathists (more secular in nature) were subjected to a coordinated de-Baathification program…and all the brutal religious dictators cheered. Bush and Cheney (and all the PNAC nuts) accomplished what they’d been unable to do in Iraq, not while the brutal secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, was still in charge.

So, knowing what was going to happen once Bush and Cheney led (lied) us into war in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and the Sunni Baathist bureaucracy (to grease Western access to and control over Iraq’s vast oil resources), I looked for those reports that would indicate a shift in Iraq from a more secular, liberal, free society into a brutal, religious, morality-police-patrolled society (like the Taliban and al Qaeda established in Afghanistan).

And sure enough, these reports started flooding in like a river of blood. Iraqis being murdered all over the place, but especially those who didn’t subscribe to the hardcore, brutal, ultra-orthodox relentless sharia brand of Islam. Businesses started being bombed and business owners were butchered, especially those who owned a liguor store, movie house, music shop or even a restaurant that served wine with meals. Iraqi women started being brutalized, raped and even murdered if they weren’t “properly” attired as sharia demands.

None of this would have happened (and still be happening) if Saddam Hussein had not been deposed. But even the deposing of Saddam Hussein wasn’t really what triggered all the carnage in Iraq. It was the wholesale removal of all Sunni Baathists from the Iraqi bureaucracy/government/military/police that opened wide the door to all the brutal religious fanatics (including a relatively small number of foreign al Qaeda fighters), and has led to all the sectarian bloodshed that has ensued between Iraqis, as well as the deaths (and maiming) of so many of our soldiers serving bravely over in Bush’s war in Iraq.

Heckuva job, Bush, Cheney and all you PNAC fools. Heckuva job. And a hell of a legacy.

70: Heckuva job, Bush, Cheney and all you PNAC fools. Heckuva job. And a hell of a legacy.

They are no fools, because from in view of imperial politics, Arab nationalism represented by the Baath party is more dangerous than Islamic fundamentalism. Religious movements are much more fragmented with different sects and all. Much easier to manipulate.

What is the punch line of Al-Sadr’s standard speech?

“God for Harry, England and St George” with the names changed.

A mass-movement is usually based on some simple idea.

“Revenge bejaysus, revenge!”

Seriously abb1, what sort of answers do you expect? In some sense all nationalisms are alike, but if you want to understand any particular version you have to immerse yourself in the culture and nobody commenting here has done that. Neither have the Americans which is one reason why most of us think they would be better off out of there.

For anybody putting faith into the current Iraqi government, this is what John Burns, who knows a thing or two and has been a pretty fair observer, has to say about Maliki:

Maliki is a man who — not to be unkind — I think if you were sitting on a local school board, you’d worry about appointing him to be principal of your local high school, and here’s a guy who’s been put in charge of a nation of 30 million people.

Has nobody considered that Maliki’s aim is to purge Basra of Iran’s influence. Sadr is a puppet of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. When the going gets tough, he goes to Qom. I hear he’s getting a crash course in Shiite theology at the moment, to make him more “statesmanlike”.

Actually, dwmf, it’s the factions supporting Maliki (especially SIIC formerly SCIRI) who have stronger long-term ties to Iran. (Perhaps you missed the reports of Maliki’s recent love-fest with Ahmadinejad). Sadr’s sojourns in that country are mostly the result of his needing a place to hide out when the going gets rough.

Sadr’s sojourns in that country are mostly the result of his needing a place to hide out when the going gets rough.

Well, choosing Qom probably has an additional long-term purpose. It would be a significant boost in authority for Sadr if he could make mujtahid. If he just wanted to hide out with the eeeevil Iranians that are backing him, he could simply go to Teheran, like the politicians the US keeps supporting. Instead, it’s seminary time. Be seen to be above the fray by hitting the books, keep out of the path of flying bullets, and lay the groundwork for greater influence. What’s not to like?

One of the puzzles of this war is the lack of class analysis that has been brought to it. Although the rightwing loves to float endless analogies between Iraq and South Korea, or Germany, or whatever, in actuality one of the unusual things about Iraq is that the U.S., from the beginning, misrecognized its natural constituency. This has always been the upper middle and upper class – the professional class. Instead, up until last year, the U.S. consistently persecuted this class, whether Shi’ite or Sunni, because it was, naturally, rewarded by the Ba’athists. This is one of the truly poisonous effects of Chalabi, who entered Iraq with the revengeful disposition with which some of the Bourbons entered France in 1815. Chalabi actually wanted to restore the social order that had existed in the mid fifties in Iraq – an insane proposition, but it did put a bare cover over Chalabi’s rampant theft. That provincial viewpoint basically kidnapped the American p.o.v. Hence, the professional class fled. One of the purposes of the accord in Anbar was to signal that they should come back. But the signal is too late: a new group, joined to the new Shi’ite governing class, is never going to let them back.

In brief, this is why the U.S. policy in Iraq is fucked over the short term. But will the governing class decide that they need the U.S. to enforce the new social arrangements in Iraq? That might be what is being decided now. Myself, I think that as they decide they do, the U.S. will be deciding to wind down in Iraq, since the monetary cost is simply too much.

abb1, for the symbols and iconography, check out

http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/sadr-billboard-palestine-street-722408.jpg

the symbols are all there: the Iraqi flag (very important; in Iran, the Islamic Republic immediately after the revolution did not really display the three colours of the flag; it began to do so again after Saddam ordered the iraqi military into Iran); images of the two elder Sadrs (Baqir – who used Marxist analysis in his very articulate economic/theological analysis – read Charles Tripp’s Moral Economy of Islam and Sadiq – who was much more of a hands-on and revered elder); and an image of the masses.

A sort of populist (not in the derogatory meaning of the term) with nationalist and *IRAQI* Shi’a iconography as well as a refernece to the people. Unlike Hizbullah of Lebanon, no images of Khomeini or other Iranian clerics.

as for speeches, apparently (based on what As’ad AbuKhalil says) he is not a very eloquent speaker. i am not sure how he rouses the public…

87: Yeah, but without the fascist overtones I think – and of course, Sadr’s movement inevitably has an anti-colonial feel to it (even if its nativism and its sectarianism are unpleasant – and sometimes deadly).