Muqtada's fight puts US to
flight By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - As it became clear last week
that "Operation Knights Assault" in Basra in south
Iraq was in serious trouble, the George W Bush
administration began to claim in off-the-record
statements to journalists that Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki had launched the operation without
consulting Washington.
The effort to
disclaim US responsibility for the operation in
which government forces battled with the Shi'ite -
Mahdi Army - militias is an indication that it was
viewed as a major embarrassment just as top
commander General David Petraeus and ambassador
Ryan Crocker are about to testify before Congress.
Behind this furious backpedaling is a
major Bush administration miscalculation about
Muqtada and his Mahdi Army, which the
administration believed was no longer capable of a coordinated
military operation. It is
now apparent that Muqtada and the Mahdi Army were
holding back because they were in the process of
retraining and reorganization, not because Muqtada
had given up the military option or had lost
control of the Mahdi Army.
The process of
the administration distancing itself from the
Basra operation began on March 27, when the
Washington Post reported that administration
officials, speaking anonymously, said that Maliki
had "decided to launch the offensive without
consulting his US allies ..." One official
claimed, "[W]e can't quite decipher" what is going
on, adding that it was a question of "who's got
the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki acted
when he did.
On March 30, the New York
Times reported from Baghdad that "few observers in
Iraq seem to believe that Maliki intended such a
bold stroke", and that "many say the notoriously
cautious politician stumbled into a major
assault".
The Times quoted a "senior
Western official in Baghdad" - the term usually
used for the ambassador or senior military
commander - as saying, "Maliki miscalculated,"
adding, "From all I hear, al-Maliki's trip was not
intended to be the start of major combat
operations right there, but a show of force."
The official claimed there were "some
heated exchanges between him and the generals, who
out of hurt pride or out of calculation or both
then insisted on him taking responsibility".
These suggestions that it was Maliki who
miscalculated in Basra are clearly false. No
significant Iraqi military action can be planned
without a range of military support functions
being undertaken by the US command. On March 25,
just as the operation was getting under way in
Basra, US military spokesman Colonel Bill Buckner
said "coalition forces" were providing
intelligence, surveillance and support aircraft
for the operation.
Furthermore, the
embedded role of the US Military Transition Teams
makes it impossible that any Iraqi military
operation could be planned without their full
involvement.
A US adviser to the Iraqi
security forces involved in the operation told a
Washington Post reporter by telephone on March 25
he expected the operation to take a week to 10
days.
Operation Knights Assault also
involved actual US-Iraqi joint combat operations.
US military spokesman Major General Kevin Bergner
denied on March 26 that any "conventional" US
forces were involved in the operation. Only on
March 30 did the US command confirm that a joint
raid by Iraqi and US special forces units had
"killed 22 suspected militants" in Basra.
Some observers have expressed doubt the
Bush administration would have chosen to have
Maliki launch such a risky campaign against
well-entrenched Shi'ite militiamen in Basra until
after the Petraeus-Crocker testimony had been
completed. But that assumes that Vice President
Dick Cheney and the Pentagon recognized the
potential danger of a large-scale effort to
eliminate or severely weaken the Mahdi Army in
Basra.
In fact, the Bush administration
and the Iraqi military were clearly taken by
surprise when the Mahdi Army in Basra attacked
security forces on March 25, initiating a major
battle for the city.
For many months the
Bush administration, encouraged by Muqtada's
unilateral ceasefire of last August, had been
testing Muqtada and the Mahdi Army to see if they
would respond to piecemeal repression by striking
back. The US command and Iraqi security forces had
carried out constant "cordon and search"
operations which had resulted in the detention of
at least 2,000 Mahdi Army militiamen since the
August ceasefire, according to a Sadrist
legislator.
Resistance to such operations
by the Mahdi Army had been minimal, and Bush
administration officials attributed Muqtada's
apparent acquiescence to restraining Iranian
influence and the decline of the Mahdi Army as a
fighting force.
At a meeting with Iranian
ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi on July 24, Crocker
had held Iran directly responsible for what he
called "militia-related activity that could be
attributed to Iranian support". After the Muqtada
ceasefire, top officials of the Maliki government
as well as rival Shi'ite party leader Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim had told US officials that Iran had
intervened to convince Muqtada to end Mahdi Army
fighting, presumably because of its desire to
stabilize the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi regime.
In an interview with the Washington Post
on December 23, David Satterfield, a senior
advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
and coordinator for Iraq, said the decline in the
number of attacks by Mahdi Army militiamen "has to
be attributed to an Iranian policy decision" and
suggested that the policy decision had been made
"at the most senior level" in Tehran.
Pentagon officials weren't sure why the
Mahdi Army was not fighting back, but the Los
Angeles Times reported on October 31 that they
hoped both that the gradual decline in attacks
would continue and that such a decline "means that
Iran has heard their warnings". Two weeks later,
Major General Jim Simmons, a deputy to Petraeus,
said the Iranian "initiatives and commitments" to
withhold weapons "appear to be holding up".
Petraeus, meanwhile, was convinced that
the ability of the Mahdi Army to resist had been
reduced by US military actions as well as by its
presumed internal disorganization. His spokesman,
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, declared in early
November, "As we've gone after that training skill
levels amongst the enemy, we've degraded their
capability..."
Then came Muqtada's
announcement on February 22 that the ceasefire
would be extended. That apparently convinced
Petraeus and the Bush White House that they could
now launch a large-scale "cordon and search"
operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra without
great risk of a military response.
That
assumption ignored the evidence that Muqtada had
been avoiding major combat because he was
reorganizing and rebuilding the Mahdi Army into a
more effective force. Thousands of Mahdi Army
fighters, including top commanders, were sent to
Iran for training - not as "rogue elements", as
suggested by the US command, but with Muqtada's
full support. One veteran Mahdi Army fighter who
had undergone such training told The Independent
last April that the retraining was "part of a new
strategy. We know we are against a strong enemy
and we must learn proper methods and techniques."
Last week, a Mahdi Army commander in Sadr
City in Baghdad was quoted by The Canadian Press
as saying, "We are now better organized, have
better weapons, command centers and easy access to
logistical and financial support."
The
ability of Mahdi Army units in Basra to stop in
its tracks the biggest operation mounted against
it since 2004 suggests that Shi'ite military
resistance to the occupation is only beginning.
Through the strength of the Mahdi Army's response
just before Petraeus' testimony, Muqtada has posed
a major challenge to the Bush narrative of
military success in Iraq.
Gareth Porter is an
historian and national security policy analyst.
The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam, was published in
2006.
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