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(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
The battle between the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr and those of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki signals a new stage in the war: the feared bloodbath has begun. Over the years “bloodbath” has become synonymous with an Iraqi civil war in which various factions fight it out for control of the country. That is exactly what happened last week.
For those who have tried to follow the shifting alliances in Iraq, the conflict between al-Mailki and al-Sadr comes as a bit of a surprise, since a year ago al-Maliki appeared to be a weak leader more than willing to defer to al-Sadr. The prime exhibit of this was al-Maliki’s all but turning over the execution of Saddam Hussein to al-Sadr. This blog described the event:
Evidence has surfaced indicating Moktada al-Sadr himself may have had a hand in the death of Saddam. According to recently released first-hand accounts of those who were there two guards uttered the name of of Mokatada directly at Hussein. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, asked Saddam about the killing of al-Sadr’s father, a crime widely attributed to Saddam. The answer could not be heard. Sources also say the guard detail for the execution was a “newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police.” All of which makes one wonder if members of al-Sadr’s own militia did not do the job or were at least present. This morning as transcripts of the infamous “cell phone pictures” are making clear; my late night hint was right on the mark. Several media sources now have identified some of the guards as militia members who deliberately taunted Saddam.
At that time I remarked:
A Republican Party that once berated Bill Clinton for allowing American troops to even conduct joint exercises with foreign troops in Bosnia now finds itself in the impossible position of having to explain American soldiers being bossed by Maliki. I cannot think of a lower point in American military history. When our commanders on the ground must scrap missions, modify them or even reverse them because Maliki says so, shows how low this nation has fallen. It is one thing to ask Americans to die for “liberating” Iraq. It is quite another to ask them to die for Maliki and al-Sadr.
Shortly after that event I speculated that al-Maliki would not last long. That prediction has proven wrong. Instead al-Maliki now feels he is strong enough to take on the forces of a leader whose men he entrusted with one of the most important events in recent Iraqi history–Saddam’s execution.
Last week al-Maliki turned on al-Sadr, justifying the attacks in Basra and Sadr City in one interview during which he stated:
Unfortunately, when we were talking about al-Qaida, among us there are those who are worse than al-Qaida.
He elaborated that “al-Qaida are killing innocent people and destroying installations and those gunmen are doing so. Al-Qaida elements want to see the failure of the political process and they are planning for that, too.”
“Those (militiamen) want what the al-Qaida wants, so we are facing another danger which comes from among us,” he said.
This is a fascinating statement, especially considering its source. The Bush Administration has constantly been messing up and mixing up various Muslim factions since before the war, but that a native Iraqi would do this raises some troubling questions which go to the heart of last week’s attacks.
al-Maliki, of course, knows that al-Qaida is Sunni, not Shiite and also that al-Sadr is more closely tied with Iran than with Osama bin Laden. In fact, during the assault, Iraqi government officials traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom to meet with al-Sadr. Qom, which is home to the largest center of Shiite scholarship in the world, is also the city where the Ayatollah Khomeini made his headquarters. Qom is also home to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose website lists him as the “Supreme Leader” of Iran’s theocracy.
Just what were Iraq officials doing in Qom?
“We asked Iranian officials to help us convince him that we were not cracking down on the Sadr group,” said an Iraqi official.
Peruse this statement carefully. When al-Maliki began his assault on Sadr’s Mahdi Army, he said there would be no deal, no surrender until the Sadr forces had been defeated. Yet his very own government journeyed to Iran, of all places, to negotiate a cease-fire–AND there is that key phrase “we asked Iranian officials.”
The Shiites in the government, quite frankly, did not like the idea of cracking down on fellow Shiites. They also no longer see the Americans as mediators or neutral. Remember as you read this the Shiites are the largest religious and political group in Iraq, composing an estimated 60% of the population.
Here is the plot so far: The Prime Minister of Iraq, who formerly had been friendly with the Shiite forces of Moqtada al-Sadr, begins a campaign to evict al-Sadr’s militia from Basra, Iraq’s largest port. To justify this assault Prime Minister al-Maliki compares al-Sadr to al-Quida. Meanwhile, al-Sadr was in the hometown of the Ayatollah Khomeini directing his forces. Iraqi officials journey to Iran to work out a cease fire.
So where was the United States in all this? Our forces, no doubt acting under orders from the Bush Administration, supported al-Maliki’s forces. al-Maliki’s al-Quida rant bears all the earmarks of something written for American, not Iraqi consumption, to justify our supporting the assault.
So here is the $64 question: whose idea was the crackdown on al-Sadr. ours or al-Maliki’s? The answer to that question would tell us a great deal about the future of the war. It makes little sense that al-Maliki would undertake such a task without collaborating with the Bush Administration. The Iraqi Army, or at least those parts of it loyal to al-Maliki is not strong enough–nor does it have the will–to take on the Mahdi Army by itself.
It also seems a bit far-fetched to assume al-Maliki, who has never been known for boldness, to hatch this idea on his own and then convince the Bush people to go along. The Bush people do not operate like that; they take orders from no one other than Dick Cheney.
The other interesting ingredient is the target. As Iraq’s largest port, Basra is also the main shipping point for Iraqi oil. It has also been a strategy of wars for over a thousand years to control the main ports. Clearing al-Sadr out of Basra would accomplish two missions: it allows better movement of Iraqi oil and it provides a better way to get resources into Iraq, whether more troops, military support or aid for Iraqi civilians.
The result was 488 people killed and 900 wounded in the offensive, according to Iraqi Interior Ministry officials. That would add up to over 25,000 dead in a year, just to give the conflict some perspective. If that isn’t a bloodbath, I don’t know what is.
But the other result has more far-reaching implications. As numerous commentators have pointed out with last week’s assault, the Iraq War became in reality what it has been all along–a civil war. We sided with one Iraqi faction–al-Maliki–against another, al-Sadr.
How close al-Sadr is to Iran has always inspired much speculation both in Iraq and around the world, but there seems little question that this action has to have pushed him further into Iran’s arms. If al-Maliki has the support of a foreign government, the United States, then it is only logical for al-Sadr to seek foreign support from the dominant Shiite country in the Middle East, Iran.
So in their usual way, the Bush Administration not only ended up complicit in the deaths of almost 500 Iraqis, but escalated Iraq’s descent into civil war. Instead of the feared bloodbath occurring when our troops left the country, the Bush Administration precipitated one. As usual it tried to hide its incompetence behind the Great Bogeyman, al-Quida.
Even more troubling, one of the most feared scenarios of the bloodbath was that it would draw in other countries in the Middle East. By pushing al-Maliki into taking on al-Sadr it brought Iran into the war. It reminds me of how people kept speaking about the feared domino theory in Vietnam only to have the Nixon Administration push the dominoes over with its invasion of Cambodia.
The one positive sign in all this is that it was not the Bush Administration, but the Iraqis themselves who at least temporarily solved the problem. Bush officials would have never condoned a journey to Qom to negotiate a cease-fire, but the Iraqis took it upon themselves to work out a deal with al-Sadr. The deal is not one al-Maliki likes, nor does it give the Bush Administration what it wanted, which was control of Basra, but it ended the bloodshed.
The good side of this is that the Shiites, at least at the moment, value unity more than factionalism. They believe they best course for them is to present a united front, even if that means having to include al-Sadr. The bad side is that the most valuable participant in all this may well be the fly on the wall in those Qom conversations between Iraqi government officials, al-Sadr and the Iranians. What took place there holds the key to the rest of the war.
Like it or not, the Bush Administration’s actions became a self-fulfilling prophesy: because they involved Iran more deeply in the Iraq War than it was two weeks ago. Hopefully this was not a deliberate move to set up a Iran invasion. Luckily November is less than a year away, because you wonder how much more the Bush people can screw up before they leave.
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