Not being a Baghdad Kremlinologist I don't know which of your choices is more accurate.

But I think we have to be more emphatic about what happened in Lebanon last summer. Hezbollah took casualties, but they demonstrated to the Israelis and to anyone watching how it played out that the Israelis flat-out lost on the ground. They were unable to get off the roads and were sitting ducks for deeply dug-in, independently-operating small units in the hillsides. It's a variation of the house-to-house urban defense tactic and in terrain like that, against a highly-mechanized attacker, it works.

What happened to the Israelis there was like what happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan. I don't see how there can be any doubt, or any prattle about "standstill equals loss for the attacker." They were flat-out beaten on the ground. That's what has Olmert in the untenable position he's in now.

Sadr called for a cease fire because it was in his long term interest to do so. The forces that are aligned with him (at least in name)met and frustrated the Maliki surge. Any more success by the Sadr groups (for lack of a better name) might have led to greater US action and higher losses for all concerned.

This would do Sadr little good since he already scored tactical and PR victories.

Kevin, you and Joyner are both implying that it was Sadr who initiated the fighting. Is that clear?

The indispensable "Badger" at his ArabLinks blog has been following the story in the Arab-language press and lays out the events of the past 48hrs thusly:

" Iran the broker ?
Kuwaiti paper AlQabas, which has been close to the negotiations-story, says there were three Iraqi members of parliament at the sessions with Moqtada on the weekend, namely Hadi AlAmari who is also secretary general of the Badr Organization (Supreme Council military wing); Ali AlAdeeb, a member of the wing of the Dawa party that is still headed by Maliki; and a third person, Qasem AlSahlani, described as a member of the political bureau of the "Dawa Party-Iraq Organization", which is a wing of the Dawa party that has split from Maliki, and is headed by former Prime Minister Jaafari.
...
So there are two points here: The McClatchy "Iran the broker" story doesn't include AlSahlani of the anti-Maliki Dawa wing, and it quotes the Iraqi List person, AlNejafi, only as acknowledging Iran as "a part" of the problem, and a part of the solution, not as the broker. Those two people have something in common, because they both belong to groups that were signatory to the so-called "12-party understanding" back in January, which included the Sadrists, some Sunni parties, and the secular Iraqi List, remarkable as the first attempt at a national-party cross-sect political formation. As an institution I don't think anything has been heard from them, but the political effort at broad-based nationalism does continue to show up in the news (Arabic, not English) from time to time. (See for instance Jaafari talks to the opposition; and Sunni-Shia conference... And recent remarks in AlHayat show Maliki was concerned about the war on Sadr morphing into a nationalist happening.
So what? The point is that if you re-read the text of Sadr's cease-fire statement yesterday, you will notice that it is not couched in the form of an agreement between the party of the first part and the party of the second part. It is a statement of what should and/or will happen, by way of complying with the Shariah requirement to not take human life without justification. All Iraqis are part of this project. It is just that one group and one leader in particular has taken the lead in laying this down and starting to implement it, and it is not Maliki. But the idea behind it is the opposite of sectarian or sect-based calculations. This was not a coup or anything like that, but it was a manifestation of nationalist thinking of a kind that further weakens the Green Zone government, because it suggested that leadership belongs to someone other than Maliki. Something like a moral takeover, perhaps you could say. And it is in this context that I think the involvement of people from the "12-party understanding" is meaningful.
...
Because in any event there's no doubt that the commander of the Qods Brigades is powerful with the Badr Brigades, and they had to be brought into the agreement, no doubt about that. The problem is the oversimplification: namely that Iran intervened to stop the fighting. Because it seems to me to be just another way of using spin to cover over the main story, which is the Iraqis' efforts to (re)unite their country over the heads of the likes of Maliki."
http://arablinks.blogspot.com/2008/03/iran-broker.html

Once again, most if not all attention in the US media has been on "winners" and "losers", with al-Maliki and his "government" declared the "victor" in all this, and M al-Sadr and his militias said to have suffered "heavy losses", completely obscuring the seething undercurrents of Iraqi politicking that is actually the driver in not only al-Maliki's ill-chosen Basra "campaign", but the responses to it across a broad spectrum local and national actors. And which, incidentally, highlighted the fact that Iran - if pushed to the wall by aggressive US military actions against it - could cause the occupiers untold grief, full stop.

This is going to make it tough for Patraeus to put a good face on the results of the surge. There clearly hasn't been political reconciliation. The Iraqi military clearly isn't up to protecting the government on its own.

Granted, the level of violence came down, so people are alive today who otherwise wouldn't have been. That's a good thing. But it's not enough to justify our slogging around in Iraq with no clear plan on how to end this thing.

I don't think it can be said that Maliki achieved even a tactical victory. He had to be personally removed from his location in Basra; the American military had to take over the bulk of the fighting; he had to change his "deadline" for al Sadr's forces to give up their weapons . . . in no way did he come out of that engagement looking like a victor. Rather, he looks like an American puppet who needs U.S. forces to haul his chestnuts out of the fire.

If anything says "they're going to have a civil war," this was it.

oops, strike my earlier comment (12:47)...poor reading comprehension skills today.

Israel has gone into Lebenon twice -- results were most disastrous. But then none of us learn from yesterday.

Maliki is not in power, folks -- a new Shah. He knows it, why don't we? Now Olmert and prviously Sharon were -- so what was their exuse. Same as U.S. in Iraq: low hanging fruit, just couldn't find the orchard.

Great link barrisj, that's really useful. Amazing to me how aggressively clueless our media are. Everything has to be shoehorned into the "appropriate" packaging--and who determines what's appropriate?--so as to cause the fewest intellectual or moral challenges to the newsconsumer. I've had a sense all along that M-al Sadr is playing a game that has very little directly to do with us and very much to do with consolidating his position as a national leader in Iraq. Fighting our surrogate to a standstill and then instituting a cease fire by his own terms seems like it would pretty effectively advance his stature and diminish Maliki's in the eyes of his own followers and any sympathetic un-committeds. But our hairdressed newsreaders have to slot it into their own simplistic categories and once they've done that, voila, they're done. Over to you, Biff.

US troops off on voter suppression duty; Deaths to follow.
America's young men and women will now be marching South to the oil important Basra area.
The purpose of the next 200 deaths in this region will be to promote voter suppression against MqSadr's political party.
Maliki and the central gov't are being paid well to follow US policy for gaining control of the oil resources. Sadr represents the nationalist interest for Iraq and our boys and girls must now squash his party. So?, says Cheney.
Sadr has been taking Ayatollah lessons and is emulating Ghandi by calling for nation wide non violent demonstrations.
He is a wily fox from a legendary martyrdom family. Stay tuned. Will Bush/Cheney (McCain?) mow down his followers? Ugh!

M al-Sadr is only acutely aware that the US military will have no compunctions about raining down 1000lb bombs, artillery, and missile strikes at heavily(Shi'ite)-populated urban districts, which has accounted for sizable casualties in this most recent fracas. Even if al-Maliki was seen as the instigator, armed resistance in the form of massed militia concentrations incurs extremely heavy civilian losses amongst al-Sadr supporters, leaving many of the survivors and their families to question the tactics which invite such brutal reprisals. M al-Sadr and his movement is caught between a rock and a hard place: resist oppression from the Da'wa/ISCI wing and get pulverised by US weaponry; turn a blind eye and find one's self and millions of followers marginalised. And over all of this looms the shadow of Iran.

It is maddening to see all these ill informed folks rushing to conclusions. We don't even know yet full understand the long term consequences of what Israel did in 2006. And we are supposed to know about Basra while it is still going on?

At least Kevin is coming around and now close to acknowledging that he has no clue as to what actually happened, nothwithstanding his prior posts purporting to know.

"It is maddening to see all these ill informed folks rushing to conclusions."

On the other hand, it's quite predictable that you, in particular, would much rather deny the reality of what's currently happening in Iraq. While you are quite correct that we don't know all of the available information from Iraq and from Basra, in particular, we do know enough to form certain preliminary impressions. And those impressions pretty clearly indicate a defeat for Maliki.

You can pretend otherwise all you want, but you have nothing to support that pretense. You cannot contradict Kevin's analysis or the analysis of anyone else here and you cannot present any contrary view backed up by anything resembling logic or data.

If you were Maliki, and had any self-respect, and everyone: the US, Iran, Shia, Sunni, Saudi, Kurd, Europe, everyone else, was laughing at you for being nearly as hopeless as Bush himself, wouldn't you feel a small desire to prove to the world that you aren't quite as bad as everyone claims?

...And those impressions pretty clearly indicate a defeat for Maliki.

In a political sense, maybe, but I'm still having a hard time reconciling Sadr's losses:

"571 Mahdi Army fighters have been killed, 881 have been wounded, 490 have been captured, and 30 have surrendered over the course of seven days of fighting."

as indicating a defeat for Maliki.

"In a political sense, maybe, but I'm still having a hard time reconciling Sadr's losses:"

Since those numbers have not been, and likely cannot be, corroborated, I don't think you can place much trust in them. Both the U.S. military and the Iraqi government have been caught in the past exaggerating numbers, just as happens with opposing sides in pretty much every war ever fought.

In this case, all one has to do is look at the actual outcome. What did Maliki give up and what did Sadr give up? What did each accomplish? If you look at Maliki's stated goals, he got none of them. His fighters could not handle the situation in either Baghdad or in Basra, so he had to call in U.S. and British forces to bail them out. He failed to get a surrender, failed to gain new ground, and was, in fact, driven out of Basra after vowing to stay there and fight "until the end".

In addition, from all accounts, the militias haven't given up any real power in Basra and their members haven't given up their weapons. The Iraqi security forces have shown that they are not capable of taking control. Far from the "decisive and final battle" that Maliki insisted would happen, he basically battled to a draw. And a draw definitely does not work in his favor.

Even worse for Maliki and for the U.S., the truce that was negotiated, brokered by Iran, appears to have been negotiated without their knowledge and without their approval. Iran is strengthened; the U.S. is weakened. The U.S. is further weakened, since the fighting of the past week has pretty conclusive demonstrated the failure of "the Surge". Petraeus is going to be in for a hard time when he testifies before Congress. This was not a good outcome.