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2 Muqtada rides the
tiger By Patrick Cockburn
Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and
surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US
invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the
religious and political movement of the
impoverished Shi'ite underclass whose lives were
ruined by a quarter of a century of war,
repression, and sanctions.
From the moment
he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of
Saddam Hussein's regime, US emissaries and Iraqi
politicians underestimated him. So far from being
the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often
described him, he often proved astute and cautious
in leading his followers.
During the
battle for Najaf with US Marines in 2004, the US
"surge" of 2007 and the escalating war with the
Supreme Islamic
Iraqi Council, he
generally sought compromise rather than
confrontation. So far from being the inexperienced
young man whom his critics portrayed - when he
first appeared they denigrated him as a
zatut (an "ignorant child," in Iraqi
dialect) - he was a highly experienced political
operator who had worked in his father's office in
Najaf since he was a teenager. He also had around
him activist clerics, of his own age or younger,
who had hands-on experience under Saddam of street
politics within the Shi'ite community. His grasp
of what ordinary Iraqis felt was to prove far
surer than that of the politicians isolated in the
Green Zone in Baghdad.
A kleptocracy
comparable to the Congo Mass movements led
by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into
insignificance. This could have happened to
Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because
their political and religious platform had a
continuous appeal for the Shi'ite masses. From the
moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely
deviated from his open opposition to the US
occupation, even when a majority of the Shi'ite
community was prepared to cooperate with the
occupiers.
As the years passed, however,
disillusion with the occupation grew among the
Shi'ite until, by September 2007, an opinion poll
showed that 73% of Shi'ites thought that the
presence of US forces in Iraq made the security
situation worse, and 55% believed their departure
would make a Shi'ite-Sunni civil war less likely.
The US government, Iraqi politicians, and the
Western media habitually failed to recognize the
extent to which hostility to the occupation drove
Iraqi politics and, in the eyes of Iraqis,
delegitimized the leaders associated with it.
All governments in Baghdad failed after
2003. Almost no Iraqis supported Saddam Hussein as
US troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly
loyal Special Republican Guard units dissolved and
went home. Iraqis were deeply conscious that their
country sat on some of the world's largest oil
reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector
Clouseau-like ability to make catastrophic errors
in peace and war had reduced the people to a state
in which their children were stunted because they
did not get enough to eat.
The primal rage
of the dispossessed in Iraq against the
powers-that-be exploded in the looting of Baghdad
when the old regime fell, and the same fury
possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life
become easier in Shi'ite Iraq in the coming years,
this might have undermined the Sadrist movement.
Instead, people saw their living standards plummet
as provision of food rations, clean water and
electricity faltered. Saddam's officials were
corrupt enough, but the new government cowering in
the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracy
comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed
the loathing with which the government was
regarded, and dodged in and out of government,
enjoying some of the fruits of power while
denouncing those who held it.
Muqtada's
political intelligence is undoubted, but the
personality of this highly secretive man is
difficult to pin down. While his father and elder
brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they
were assassinated in 1999 he had every reason to
stress his lack of ability or ambition in order to
give the mukhabarat [Saddam Hussein's
secret police] less reason to kill him. As the son
and son-in-law of two of Saddam Hussein's most
dangerous opponents, he was a prime suspect and
his every move was watched.
When Saddam
fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his
forbears' political inheritance and consciously
associated himself with them on every possible
occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I
and Sadr II [Muqtada's father-in-law and father,
both assassinated by Saddam] against a background
of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than a
leader exploiting his connection to a revered or
respected parent. Muqtada persistently emphasized
the Sadrist ideological legacy: puritanical
Shi'ite Islam mixed with anti-imperialism and
populism.
Riding the tiger of the
Sadrist movement The first time I thought
seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April
2003 when I heard that he was being accused of
killing a friend of mine, Sayyid Majid al-Khoei,
that intelligent and able man with whom I had
often discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the
involvement of Muqtada himself, which is a matter
of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist
supporters in the lynching is proven and was the
start of a pattern that was to repeat itself over
the years.
Muqtada was always a man riding
a tiger, sometimes presiding over, sometimes
controlling the mass movement he nominally led.
His words and actions were often far apart. He
appealed for Shi'ite unity with the Sunni against
the occupation, yet after the bombing of the
Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, he was
seen as an ogre by the Sunni, orchestrating the
pogroms against them and failing to restrain the
death squads of the Mahdi Army.
The excuse
that it was "rogue elements" among his militiamen
who were carrying out this slaughter is not
convincing, because the butchery was too extensive
and too well organized to be the work of only
marginal elements. But the Sadrists and the
Shi'ite in general could argue that it was not
they who had originally taken the offensive
against the Sunni, and the Shi'ite community
endured massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda for
several years before their patience ran out.
Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni
political and religious leaders unequivocally
condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on
Shi'ite civilians if he was to cooperate with them
against the occupation. They did not do so, and
this was a shortsighted failure on their part,
since the Shi'ites, who outnumbered the Sunni
Arabs three to one in Iraq, controlled the police
and much of the army. Their retaliation, when it
came, was bound to be devastating.
Muqtada
was criticized for not doing more, but neither he,
nor anybody else could have stopped the killing at
the height of the battle for Baghdad in 2006. The
Sunni and Shi'ite communities were both terrified,
and each mercilessly retaliated for the latest
atrocity against their community. "We try to
punish those who carry out evil deeds in the name
of the Mahdi Army," says Hussein Ali, the former
Mahdi Army leader. "But there are a lot of Shi'ite
regions that are not easy to control and we
ourselves, speaking frankly, are sometimes
frightened by these great masses of people."
American officials and journalists seldom
showed much understanding of Muqtada, even after
[US Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in
2004]. There were persistent attempts to
marginalize him or keep him out of government
instead of trying to expand the Iraqi government's
narrow support base to include the Sadrists. The
first two elected Shi'ite prime ministers, Ibrahim
al-Jaafari and Nuri al-Maliki, came under intense
pressure from Washington to sever or limit their
connection with Muqtada.
But government
officials were not alone in being perplexed by the
young cleric. In a lengthy article on him
published in its December 4, 2006, issue, Newsweek
admitted that "Muqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding
America's fate in Iraq". But the best the magazine
could do to assist its readers in understanding
Muqtada was to suggest that they should "think of
him as a young Mafia don".
Of course,
Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of
Iraqi leader who proponents of the war in
Washington had suggested would take over from
Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth,
dark-suited, English-speaking exiles who the White
House had hoped would turn Iraq into a compliant
US ally, Muqtada looked too much like a younger
version of ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini.
Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of
the United States in Iraq, which it has never
resolved. The problem was that the
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