Prior to leaving a comment on this thread, all contributors must don their tin foil helmets.

But Kevin, the factions that you refer to that are hostile to Sadr are all part of the Iraqi government, and it benefits Sadr with a lot of Iraqis to be seen as independent of Iran.

If Iran, the Maliki government, and the US all turn on him, that makes him a nationalist hero. Of course it could get him killed if he's unlucky, but if the Shiites rally to his side, that's 60% of the country. I wouldn't even be surprised to see the Saudis start to think about helping him if Iran turns on him; they want a buffer between them and Iran.

This could turn out really bad for almost everyone (except al Qaeda) unless e.g. al Sistani appreciates the threat to his country (such as it is) and brokers a livable compromise. That might be, Mahdi Army disbands but under agreement to forgive and live and let live, etc. Otherwise, zealous MA partisans will try to take down as much with themselves as they can. Like I said before, listen to what Sen. Webb is suggesting. If we don't hash this out, and try to bulldoze, we will be nostalgic for what went before.

All the militias in Iraq (except for Sadr's) trained in Iran. There, they were helped/armed/trained by our CIA. Badr militia (trained in Iran) is really the Iraq Army as well as the fiefdom of a political party.

When the President of Iran visited Iraq the other week it was a state visit and the man was kissed on both cheeks by al Maliki.

So...to review..CIA /Iran trains all Iraq militias except for the Sadr one. Our man in Baghdad (that would be Patreaus) says the Iranians are behind Sadr, AQ and the causes of the roadside bombs. Our other man in Baghdad (al Maliki) loves the Iranian ruling party.

So, sometimes the Iranians are our allies and sometimes they are our enemies. Confusing ? BigQuestion: Why did we build a deadly house of cards in Iraq?

...and (3) the U.S. military may be laying the groundwork for a full scale assault on the Mahdi Army.

Which would inflame anti-US sentiment given the likely civilian casualties. Sadr in desperation, brinkmanship, or Iran playing bait-and-switch? (Ah for the simpler days of Kremlin watching.)

As optical weenie suggested, don your tin foil helmets. A slug of lithium and a tall bourbon may also help.

Regardless of whether Sadr won or lost, he certainly beat the spread. And that's all that really counts when you are an insurgent.

one more thought*

There's no logic to what Team Bush does. As the crazy but smart like a fox Chalabi noted to author Mark Danner: "The American tragedy in Iraq is that your friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region."

dont u guys see that iraq is how they are testing blackwater for the hostile takeover before the 2008 election!!!!!!!!
freedom will soon be just a sparkle in the eyes of our children.

Gee, this is like meeting Socrates: every other commentator, right and left, knows exactly what's going on in Iraq and how it proves whatever point they've been making all along, and here comes the one guy who at least knows that he doesn't know.

For myself, I don't know either. For a while, I thought maybe Sadr was looking for face-saving way to back down, brokered by Sistani, but if that's what Sadr wanted, he didn't get it, so who knows what now.

Meanwhile, there's the threat that if the Sadrists don't disarm they'll be excluded from the upcoming elections. That has to concern the Sadrists who are actually in Parliament, because their jobs (and Green Zone protections) are on the line.

Maliki and his allies are in a cleft stick, because if Sadrists do score the plausibly-suggested large election gains, Sadrist access to the levers of "legitimate" government increases, and other parties' access (including both graft and the ability to install their militia members in the "Iraqi" security forces) decreases. Right now Maliki et al have the political legitimacy, such as it is, against the Sadrists' hold over the actual territory, but post-election that situation might change drastically. So it behooves the "legitimate" government to either destroy the Sadrists as a political force or convince them to destroy themselves as a military force.

Good luck on that.

Joe Buck’s point need to be underlined and highlighted:

…and it benefits Sadr with a lot of Iraqis to be seen as independent of Iran.

The work-a-day, bullet dodging Iraqi Shiite does not want to be dominated or even strongly influenced by those pesky Persians. To that end Mookie, a nationalist, is their man.

As I said earlier, he is a survivor who seems quite able prosper despite attempts by Maliki or the American infidels to derail him. In fact, the more we try the more support he probably can rally.

I wonder if it is really in our best interest to smash him or worse yet, kill him. If he is gone now does Crocker et al really think that all those who have “supported” him will throw up their arms and walk away? No they won’t.

What I'd like to know is why is the Iraq Coalition Casualties website (icasualties.org) inaccessible during the first day of the Petraeus / Crocker hearings?

Kevin Drum tells his readers to ignore him.

And if anyone tells you that they know for sure what's really happening in Iraq, that's a good sign you should put them on your permanent "ignore" list.

The whole, if Lowery says it, it must be somewhat true BS.

Guess I just don't think the recent surge in infighting is a sign of a weaking Sadr. And just a week ago, Kevin was talking about how successful the surge was??? The deep breath before the abyss. The this whole post by Kevin is a paradise of contradiction.

Sort of a "nobody likes Sadr" but "he's going to win the next election in Iraq" BS. It's that confounded Karl Rove shadow that desperately follows Kevin Drum from post to post.

Maybe Kevin needs an exoticism, or something?

So no one knows, can predict, figure out, guess at, or otherwise ascertain what the critical player in Iraq is doing or is going to do next? I guess that shows how influential and important the US is in that godforsaken mess of a country we have managed to destroy.

It's time to get out now.

Kevin: How's Sadr doing?

M. Sadr: Chillin, holmes. Watching last weeks Lost! How you doing?

Kevin: Why do I ask.

Thanks.

The tide has turned against popular rule in Iraq and the power players are coalescing into an oligarchy of traditional rulers. Sunni tribes, Iranian dominated Shiite businessmen and wealthy exiles have conspired with the US to keep the poorest and largest faction of Iraqis from exercising their political will. The only way al Sadr can prevail is at the ballot box, but the way the structure of government was set up prevents his popularity from delivering enough power. He cannot win the civil war because of US power. Al Sadr's other problem is the unrelenting pounding his people take from from US force, which appears to becoming a substitute for the force Saddam wielded against the Sadr City and Basra Shiites. Saddam killed al Sadr's father and brother. The US is trying to kill al Sadr and continue the Baathist legacy of pounding on poor Shiites with Sunnis and secular Iraqis to keep the oil wealth flowing out of the country. Al Sadr and the poor Shiites of Iraq have a difficult future ahead.

12 billion a month of YOUR money and a lot of BLOOD, that's what's happening in Iraq.

How's al-Sadr doing in Iraq? That's easy to tell. When Maliki sent in the army to drive him out, troops deserted by the battlion. Remember how Bush said 'we'd stand down as the Iraqi stood up?' Well, the only Iraqi standing up is the Mahdi Army. What we need to do is throw Maliki under the bus and make up with Sadr, then hit the road running for Kuwait

Actually, Kevin, it's very simple. Sadr can't be crushed and the attempt to do so, especially if we're using our military to support that attempt, will only make him stronger. No matter what this or that faction in the Iraqi government is saying, he's well on his way to becoming the dominant (non-Kurdish) leader in Iraq.

Why do I say he can't be crushed? Because we already tried twice with our far superior military and we failed both times. Now the Iraqi forces gave up quickly and abjectly. There's no evidence that they will get any better at it in the future.

And Iran? Well, sure, they're nervous about their ally Sadr who has taken a more nationalist position than their puppets, er, other allies in Iraq. But they'll come on board as soon as they see which way the wind is blowing.

We'd be a lot better off if we sent Sadr some signals that we'll be ready to deal with him when he takes power. By, say, not blowing up his followers, armed or otherwise.

reading these comments is making me a sudden believer in global warming...

on the subject of hot air, our lovely media is shoveling its usual intensely warm, odiferous product.

talismangate:

Tuesday, April 08, 2008
And the winner is…

Sorry Mr. Sudarsan Raghavan, your competitor over at the New York Times has out-dimwitted you yet again.

For those of you late to the game, it is the opinion of this blog that Raghavan and James Glanz, the Baghdad bureau chiefs of the Washington Post and the NYTimes respectively, have been outdoing each other in authoring shoddy news reports about recent events in Iraq.

But today, Glanz may have gone where no clueless reporter has gone before.

To start with, there’s an incessant urgency in trying to corroborate his past narrative about the battle of Basra, which just doesn’t stand-up to even the most casual application of logic. How is that with the Iraqi Army firmly in control of all of Basra—including the ports and the pipelines—and with the majority of the men with arrest warrants out on their names either dead or in custody, AND with Maliki’s deadline for the handover of heavy arms due to expire TOMORROW, that Glanz still has the gall to write, and write, and write: “…the badly coordinated push into Basra…”, “…the Mahdi Army stopping Mr. Maliki’s Basra assault cold…”, “…Mr. Maliki’s military operation in Basra foundered against Mahdi resistance…”, and “…the military ‘fiasco’ of his Basra adventure.” How is that?

It seems that Glanz hopes that by repeating something often enough, he can magically make it real.

But I think that he’s losing whatever hold on reality he may have had, and it is beginning to show in his writing. Take this logic-bender:

The crackdown on the Mahdi Army has also eroded Mr. Maliki’s credibility with a large segment of the public that fears Mr. Sadr’s militia but also sees him as a legitimate champion of their interests.

So a segment of the population fears Sadr yet still looks up to him as its protector. Does this make any sense to anyone?

To authenticate such stretches, Glanz cites a single source to firm up his diagnosis:

Reflecting that calculus of power on the streets, Amal Mosa, a 28-year-old computer systems worker in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad, said, “I think Maliki and America are more powerful than JAM, but Maliki alone would be smashed by it,” referring to the Mahdi Army by its Arabic acronym.
There is something very fishy about this quote, since there is no “Arabic acronym” for the Mahdi Army. It is either referred to in Arabic as jaish almahdi, jaish alimam, or jama’at alsadr. “JAM” is an acronym invented by the U.S. military and is never used by speakers of Iraqi Arabic. I don’t want to accuse Glanz of fabricating a quote, but even if this error is somehow passed on to Glanz’s interpreter then it would seem doubtful that Glanz, who boasted in his Op-Ed over the weekend that he can speak some Arabic, would not have caught this error while in translation or not figured out that it was quite weird for a native speaker to employ American terminology.

But it gets even weirder:

But for many Iraqis, in the past few weeks Mr. Maliki has cemented his reputation as a tool of the Americans.
But towards the end of the article, Glanz writes:

Opinion appears to have divided into two camps: the Sadr followers, who accuse Mr. Maliki of being a tool of American policy, and anti-Sadrists, who say they are sick of extortion and gunmen.
So these “many Iraqis” that Glanz references earlier turn out to be “Sadr followers”. Duh! Why didn’t he make that as crystal clear when he first mentioned the sentiment?

Heavens, this piece is poorly written indeed!

Glanz then employs the same trick that Raghavan used that I had pointed out a couple of days ago, which is to quote that crazy old coot of a Kurdish MP, Mahmoud Othman. But there’s another ‘quote pattern’ emerging since a great number of the negative reports about what had transpired in Basra carry quotes from Joost Hiltermann, the Istanbul/Amman-based analyst for the International Crisis Group. Hiltermann has become the media’s go-to ‘expert’ for those flashy ‘doom and gloom’ quotes. Wait, wasn’t it Hiltermann who a couple of years ago predicted that Iraq had descended into the bloodiest of civil wars and that no one will make it out alive, or something like that? Isn’t his credibility just a tad bit questionable at this point?

But poor, gullible Glanz delivers his own coup de grace when he enthusiastically writes:

A truer gauge of the two sides’ real power may come Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the day United States troops captured the Iraqi capital, when Mr. Sadr has called for a million of his followers to march through the streets of Baghdad to protest the continuing presence of American forces in Iraq.

Muqtada al-Sadr cancelled the demonstration. He did so today. It may have escaped Glanz’s notice because Sadr’s declaration to this effect was twisted around by the western wire reports and made to seem as if he was threatening to end that fictional ‘ceasefire’ that the western media had invented to begin with.

So by cancelling the demonstration, does that make Sadr more powerful than Maliki or less so, according to the metrics by which Glanz gauges power dynamics in Iraq?

I can’t wait to see how Glanz will try to spin this one tomorrow.

On a final note, I’d like to take issue with this assertion: “…the force that has won past showdowns: the street power wielded by the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr.”

Ahemmm, I guess Glanz is referring to the battles of April and August 2004. I was there, with front-row seating, watching these events unfold in real time. I kinda remember arriving at these outcomes differently. I remember Chalabi’s role overt role in the first instance, and his covert role in getting Sistani to intervene in the second. It is still too early to tell these stories in detail, but enough of it is already out in the public domain that would preclude Glanz from making such silly assertions, or so I thought. It is as if the Sadr’s spokesmen have taken over the New York Times bureau. Can someone please check whether any gunmen had stormed that office and are forcing Glanz and Co. to write this stuff at gunpoint? Maybe that’s why no NYTimes reporters have been able to travel to Basra and see things for themselves even after two weeks have elapsed…

posted by Nibras Kazimi نبراس الكاظمي at 5:19 PM |

Opaque is hardly the word for it.

The Mahdi army gives the govt forces a sound thrashing - and then accepts a cease fire. That's counter-intuitive. Why would a victorious Sadr accept a truce - unless there was something in for him and if so why not let the fighting go on longer and get more concessions.

Perhaps Sadr's victory was not so complete, or he's weaker than we think. For some reason, he apparently can't go too far.

Maybe in a decade or so we'll find out.

I guess it is good that Kevin is abandoning his prior posts asserting how Basra was a disaster and Sadr was winning.

if maliki is in control of the port (and therefore the money that flows throught it) and most of Basra....then HOW was the government thrashed by Sadr?

Tigerhawk:

Having armed and trained the Mahdi "army," Iran does not want to see its most important asset inside Iraq either win a decisive victory over the government (however unlikely that might be) or get ripped to shreds. If the Mahdi army weakened the Maliki government too much, the United States might throw in the towel and back a Sunni restoration. That is the last thing Tehran wants because it resurrects Iran's worst nightmare, the possibility in the future of another ruinous conventional war with Iraq. If, however, the Maliki government and the United States wiped the deck with the Mahdi thugs -- much more likely -- Iran would lose its principal means for exerting influence inside Iraq. Tehran's hope for a weak, Finlandized Shi'ite government would be less likely than a relatively strong coalition Arab/Kurd government backed by the United States for decades to come. The best result for Iran, therefore, is to preserve the Mahdi army as a constant threat that can be rolled out as necessary to destabilize, threaten, or deter the government of Iraq. It is therefore not wonder that Iran pressured al-Sadr to declare a ceasefire, and hardly something for which an American general should give "credit."

I have not seen any discussion of why Sadr is in Iran: he is studying on an accelerated schedule to become an Ayatollah. These religious studies supposedly take a decade or more and he is attempting to complete them in two years. His father and grandfather were Grand Ayatollahs who were murdered in 1999 by Saddam. Sadr as Ayatollah introduces an interesting dynamic to the Iraq situation.

BTW, evidently Sadr was not a particularly attentive student previously. His nickname was 'Mullah Atari' for his interest in video games.

What about that American general I heard the other day refering to "Sayed Muqtada al-Sadr"? I thought our use of the honorific title meant ....

oh, hell. I don't know what it means.

Horatio Parker:

" The Mahdi army gives the govt forces a sound thrashing - and then accepts a cease fire. That's counter-intuitive. Why would a victorious Sadr accept a truce - unless there was something in for him and if so why not let the fighting go on longer and get more concessions.

Perhaps Sadr's victory was not so complete, or he's weaker than we think. For some reason, he apparently can't go too far."

Meditate upon the first Gulf War (1990-91), grasshopper - why didn't US forces proceed to Baghdad, if the US won the war?

neill: "Having armed and trained the Mahdi "army," Iran does not want to see its most important asset inside Iraq either win a decisive victory over the government (however unlikely that might be) or get ripped to shreds."

Thanks for posting that as the first sentence; it helps in ignoring the rest of your comment. Sadr is the *anti-*Iran guy. Maliki is running a group which was raised, trained and used by Iran.

"Having armed and trained the Mahdi 'army,' Iran does not want to see its most important asset inside Iraq either win a decisive victory over the government (however unlikely that might be) or get ripped to shreds."

As noted above, this is simply delusional. The Iranian-backed and Iranian-trained forces are the militias tied to Maliki, not to Sadr, militias that have been even more tightly integrated into the Iraqi national army in recent days. Iran's "most important asset" is currently in control.

"If the Mahdi army weakened the Maliki government too much, the United States might throw in the towel and back a Sunni restoration."

And this is even more delusional. The Bush administration will never do this, not because it would be incredibly shortsighted and stupid, which it would, but because it would involve them backing down and losing face.

"That is the last thing Tehran wants"

And the one thing that Tehran has no reason to fear, thanks to the Bush administration.

"If, however, the Maliki government and the United States wiped the deck with the Mahdi thugs -- much more likely"

Not based on the evidence to date. Maliki got none of his stated goals and far from "fighting to the end" and "refusing to negotiate," he backed down ignominiously.

"Iran would lose its principal means for exerting influence inside Iraq."

Nope, Maliki and the Badr Brigades are still very much a power. You really do need to do your homework befor spouting off here again.

Remember, we've also threatened Iran ourselves, and Iraq has also attacked Iran in the past, so a moderate amount of chaos in Iraq is in Iran's best interest (especially lacking any sort of modus vivendi with the Bush administration).

So, Iran may mostly support a group that mostly supports the Iraqi government, but it wouldn't hurt them too much to keep Sadr at fighting trim as well.