Deadline looming, US forces the
issue By Marc Erikson
Since
the beginning of April, more than 100 US soldiers and
1,000 Iraqis have died, making this the bloodiest month
of the year-long occupation of Iraq. With just 11 weeks
to go before the anticipated handover of sovereignty to
Iraqi authorities on June 30, the worst fears of the
occupation forces appeared to be coming true in early
April, when they faced not only renewed intense battles
with militants in the Sunni triangle (Fallujah), but -
for the first time - coordinated attacks by large
numbers of Shi'ites led by the firebrand young cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr in southern and central Iraq and parts
of Baghdad.
Fighting in Fallujah and elsewhere
has subsided and given way to negotiations at encircled
Fallujah and a soft siege of the holy city of Najaf (the
Shi'ite "Vatican"). But the Muqtada uprising challenges
the notion that Iraq's long-oppressed majority Shi'ites
would tolerate the occupation in the expectation of
attaining the lead role in the new post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq, indeed, would tacitly support it. Do the Fallujah
troubles and concurrently launched attacks by Muqtada's
Mahdi Army actually portend (as numerous analysts and
commentators say) that US plans for Iraq have come to a
deadend? Is this "Bush's Vietnam" as Senator Ted Kennedy
propounds with conviction? Did the Fallujah and Najaf
developments spell "Tet offensive"?
Even
acclaimed Vietnam veteran, later Vietnam war protester
John Kerry thinks that's overdrawn. "Not yet," the
Democratic presidential candidate responded when asked
about his mentor Kennedy's comment. I would agree with
Kerry - and take it a bit further. The Fallujah events
were occasioned by the killing and barbaric desecration
of the bodies of four American civilian security guards
by a depraved mob. The simultaneous but unrelated
Muqtada rebellion, however, was deliberately forced by
the US military to flush out, disarm and disband the
cleric's rag-tag Mahdi Army. As the commander of US
forces in Baghdad, Major General Martin Dempsey, told
reporters early on in the rebellion (on April 5): "If we
can get rid of the Mahdi Army now, I think the Iraq of
July 1 will be better off." Of course, he might just
have been trying to put a brave face on a potentially
debilitating setback. But there is plenty of evidence
suggesting that the radical Shi'ite uprising did not
take the Americans by surprise or hit them unprepared as
the result of yet another signal intelligence failure.
In February, the Strategic Studies Institute of
the US Army War College published a detailed study by
its Middle East expert W Andrew Terrill, "The United
States and Iraq's Shi'ite Clergy: Partners or
Adversaries?" (1) In it, Terrill lays out with great
specificity the ideological bent and views of Iraq's
different Shi'ite factions and organizations, traces the
historical background of the major groups, discusses
their relative strengths, and provides information on
their links to and support from organizations abroad and
foreign governments, notably Iran. Terrill and his
collaborators worked for months in Iraq in 2003 to
gather information for their study, and I have seen a no
better-researched account of the Iraqi Shi'ites
anywhere. The report's section on Muqtada, in
particular, stands out for its detail and precision.
One must assume that US intelligence services
and the military have in their possession a much greater
wealth of information than reported by Terrill. It is,
thus, inconceivable that US occupation authorities were
caught unawares by and did not anticipate developments
that unfolded starting April 3-4 - though perhaps the
scope of the Muqtada-led insurgency was not predicted
with accuracy. The sequence of events leading up to
April 4, when more peaceful protests in and around Najaf
turned violent, strongly suggests that the US not merely
"saw it coming", but deliberately provoked the Muqtada
insurrection as part of a general house-cleaning prior
to July 1.
In April 2003, US-allied cleric Abdul
Majid al-Khoei, son of the Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim
Khoei, the revered teacher of Iraq's senior-most Shi'ite
leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, returned to
Iraq from exile in London. Shortly thereafter, he was
murdered by an allegedly Muqtada-organized mob in Najaf.
The same mob then surrounded Sistani's home and
threatened to kill him if he didn't leave Najaf
forthwith. Only Sistani's ability to quickly mobilize
his own followers and drive off the mob saved his life.
Seven months later, in November, sealed
indictments and arrest warrants were issued against
Muqtada and 24 of his followers in connection with the
al-Khoei murder. Starting in February, the warrants were
enforced and by end-March, 13 suspects had been arrested
and preparations for trials began. A 14th suspect,
Muqtada's top-aide Mustafa al-Yacoubi, was detained on
April 3. A day earlier, Muqtada's newspaper had been
shut down on accusations of incitement to violence. On
April 4, protests against the Yacoubi arrest and
newspaper closure in Najaf turned violent and police
stations and government installations in several cities
and towns in south-central Iraq were taken over by the
Mahdi Army. However, within days the US military
regained full control and expelled or arrested the
Muqtada followers - though it refrained from moving into
Najaf itself. When coalition spokesman Dan Senor was
asked on April 5 why the arrest warrants, long issued,
were being enforced now, he baffled reporters
responding, "This sort of bubbled up just now."
Well, nothing like that just bubbles up. I
consider it a planned US operation, designed to corner
Muqtada step-by-step and to leave him with no choice to
either surrender or lash out and seek an open fight he
cannot win.
But the plot is more intriguing than
that. Muqtada is closely allied with the radical clergy
in Iran, notably an Iraqi exile, the virulently
anti-Semitic Grand Ayatollah Kazem Ha'eri, who seeks to
establish clerical political rule in Iraq on the model
of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Iranian
revolution of 1979. By tightening the noose around
Muqtada, the US also sought to probe the nature and
degree of Iranian support for the 3,000-5,000 strong
Mahdi Army. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on
April 7: "We know the Iranians have been meddling and
it's unhelpful to have neighboring countries meddling in
the affairs of Iraq." On April 12, the head of US
Central Command, General John Abizaid, said bluntly:
"Syria and Iran are involved in Iraq, and their
involvement is not meant to assist the US-led coalition
there."
The pressure on Muqtada appears to be
having the desired effect. On April 13, with the full
knowledge of the US military, an Iranian delegation
(reportedly including Revolutionary Guards intelligence
officers) conducted meetings in Najaf with Muqtada and
senior Shi'ite leaders of the Najaf Hawza (seminary and
religious center), which is headed by Sistani. Their
apparent aim was to either put Muqtada under the senior
Shi'ite clergy's control and disarm the Mahdi Army, or
to get Muqtada to leave Iraq and return to exile in
Iran.
The outcome of these Iranian efforts
remains unclear - as does the quid pro quo the
"negotiators" will have asked of the US. Iran and the US
are competing for influence over the post-July 1 Iraq,
and the last thing the US - on the strategic plane -
will likely want to see is an axis of Iran and a
Shi'ite-run Iraq, which would form an over 80 million
power bloc controlling some of the world's largest oil
reserves. But for now, tactical arrangements that buy
the US some time and surface calm and get Iran out of US
gun sights apparently suit both sides. If there is to be
any chance for a more stable transition period from July
1 to prospective elections next January, the US needs to
strengthen the position of the moderate Sistani and
retain his (and the Shi'ite majority's) tacit support.
Iran's leaders (Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani et al), in turn, do not want to face
heightened US political pressure, which could encourage
internal opposition to their rule.
In the longer
run, this is, of course, an untenable arrangement (and
may prove unstable even in the near term). Iran's
absolute ruler, Khamenei, and his supporters want
clerical rule in Iraq much as they exercise it in Iran.
To that end, Muqtada and his followers are their natural
allies. The US wants secular rule in Iraq as laid down
in the provisional new constitution, and counts on the
support of Sistani and the Najaf Hawza leaders who
oppose Khomeini-style clerical political rule, in fact,
regard Khomeini's notion of political power by the
clergy (velayet-e faqih) as heresy. (Their view
is shared by Iranian oppositionist, the Grand Ayatollah
Hussein Ail Montazeri).
Ultimately, such
fundamentally opposing views will not be able to
co-exist. Though for the time being, with Iranian
prodding, Muqtada appears to have submitted to the
authority of Sistani and the other three ayatollahs of
the Hawza, the US is keeping up the pressure and wants
to see Muqtada brought to trial. The L Paul Bremer
coalition authority is also moving to install key
personalities in positions of power to serve in the
Iraqi government that will formally take over on July 1.
On April 9, Iraqi Governing Council member
Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shi'ite, was appointed national
security director and IGC member Samir Shakir Mahmood
Sumaidy, a Sunni, was appointed interior minister. Prior
to that, in late March, Major-General Mohammad Abdullah
Mohammad al-Shehwani, a former Ba'athist officer in
exile since 1989, took over as director-general of the
new National Intelligence Service.
Rubaie and
Shewani are likely to play a major role in the future
Iraq. Rubaie is Bremer's back channel to Sistani, who,
to date, has refused to meet coalition authority
members. A spokesman for the Da'wa Party, which was a
feared underground organization that previously sought
to depose Saddam, Rubaie later became a distinguished
physician in London, where he collaborated with Abdul
Majid al-Khoei (murdered last April in Najaf) in the
past resistance to Saddam. Since returning to Iraq, he
has been in regular contact with Ayatollah Hussein
al-Sadr, Sistani's man in Baghdad, and has had
face-to-face meetings with Sistani. (Rubaie studied with
Hussein al-Sadr's grandfather, the Grand Ayatollah
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, who was murdered by Saddam
agents in 1980).
Shewani in the 1980s was a
trusted aide of then defense minister General Adnan
Khairallah Tulfa, whom Saddam had killed in 1989, though
he was married to his sister. Tulfa was a hero of the
Iran-Iraq war and Saddam feared him as a rival. Shewani
alone among Tulfa's close associates escaped a purge
following Tulfa's "accidental" death in a helicopter
crash. He was abroad at the time and stayed there,
low-profile, under US Central Intelligence Agency
protection.
Daily TV pictures from Iraq portray
killings and mayhem, and there is plenty of that. Behind
the scenes, there is the more complex, largely
unreported reality of strategic and tactical positioning
and maneuvering by the major players. The outcome is
uncertain, but the Vietnam image is thoroughly
misleading. When the US withdrew from Vietnam, the
victorious communists took over, facing no internal
opposition. US withdrawal from Iraq now would be the
occasion for civil war, likely breakup of the country
into warring states, and unstable and unpredictable
regional strategic consequences. The principal parties,
the US, Iran, Iraqi Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds, all know
it and are moving for optimal leverage. That's not
pretty, but it's not the end of the world or of Iraq.
