Page 2 of
2 Muqtada
rides the tiger By Patrick
Cockburn
overthrow of Saddam Hussein and
his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by
elections that would produce a government
dominated by the Shi'ites allied to the Kurds. It
soon became evident that the Shi'ite parties that
were going to triumph in any election would be
Islamic parties, and some would have close links
to Iran.
The Arab Sunni states were aghast
at the sight of Iran's defeat in the Iran-Iraq war
being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shi'ite
axis" developing in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. Much
of this was ignorance and paranoia on the part of
the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted to
make Iraq a client state they would have found the
country as prickly a place for Iranians as it was
to be for Americans. It was the US attempt to
create an anti-Iranian Iraq
that was to play into
Iranian hands and produce the very situation that
Washington was trying to avoid.
The more
Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because
of its nuclear program, the more the Iranians
sought to make sure that it had the potential to
strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he
was executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let
down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with
Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shi'ite
opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being
Iranian stooges. But American pressure meant that
the Sadrists had to look to Iran for help, and in
a military confrontation the Mahdi Army saw Iran
as an essential source of weapons and military
expertise.
The new Iraqi political
landscape On reappearing after his
four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shi'ites
and identified the US occupation and al-Qaeda in
Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The call
was probably sincere, but it was also too late.
Baghdad was now largely a Shi'ite city, and people
were too frightened to go back to their old homes.
The US "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop
in sectarian killings, but it was also true that
the Shi'ites had won and there were few mixed
areas left.
The US commander General David
Petraeus claimed that security was improving, but
only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes
were returning. Muqtada was the one Shi'ite leader
capable of uniting with the Sunni on a nationalist
platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never
accepted that their rule had ended. If Sunni and
Shi'ite could not live on the same street, they
could hardly share a common identity.
The
political and military landscape of Iraq changed
in 2007 as the Sunni population turned on
al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge", but it
was still an important development. Al-Qaeda's
massive suicide bombs targeting civilians had been
the main fuel for Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian warfare
since 2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the
insurgent groups had turned against al-Qaeda after
it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni
community at the end of 2006 by declaring the
Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was
al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one son from every
Sunni family into its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs
with the government such as garbage collectors
were killed.
By the fall of 2007 the US
military command in Baghdad was trumpeting
successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been
largely eliminated in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala.
But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid
for by the United States, did not owe their prime
loyalty to the Iraqi government. Muqtada might
speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi
opposition to the US occupation, but many
anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had quite different
ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shi'ite victory
in the 2006 battle of Baghdad.
A new breed
of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging.
One of them, Abu Abed, is a former member of the
insurgent Islamic Army. He operates in the Amariya
district of west Baghdad, where he is a commander
of the US-backed Amariya Knights, whom the US
calls Concerned Citizens. His stated objectives
show that the rise of the new Sunni militias may
mark only a new stage in a sectarian civil war.
"Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed.
"After we finish with al-Qaeda here, we will turn
towards our main enemy, the Shi'ite militias. I
will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shi'ite area
near Amariya taken over by the Mahdi Army], then
Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."
The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary
record of resistance to Saddam Hussein, for which
they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors
in Iraq by the United States was to try to
marginalize Muqtada and his movement. Had he been
part of the political process from the beginning,
the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous
Iraq would have been greater.
In any real
accommodation between Shi'ite and Sunni, the
Sadrists must play a central role. Muqtada
probably represented his constituency of millions
of poor Shi'ites better than anybody else could
have done. But he never wholly controlled his own
movement, and never created as well-disciplined a
force as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his
ambitions for reconciliation with the Sunni could
take wing unless the Mahdi Army ceased to be
identified with death squads and sectarian
cleansing.
The war in Iraq has gone on
longer than World War I and, while violence
diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has
been resolved. The differences between Shi'ite and
Sunni, the disputes within the respective
communities, and the antagonism against the US
occupation are all as great as ever. The only way
the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army could create
confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what
he said when he called for unity, would be for
them to be taken back voluntarily into the areas
in Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been
driven. But there is no sign of this happening.
The disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too
far for the country to exist as anything more than
a loose federation.
Patrick
Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The
Independent in London. He has visited Iraq
countless times since 1977 and was recipient of
the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting
as well as the 2006 James Cameron Memorial Award.
His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in
Iraq, was short-listed for a National Book
Critics Circle Award in 2007. This essay is the
last chapter in his new book,Muqtada: Muqtada
al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for
Iraq, just published by
Scribner.
(From Muqtada by
Patrick Cockburn. Copyright 2008 by Patrick
Cockburn. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an
Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
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