Well, trying to kill all the members of the Mahdi Army in Basra hasn’t quite worked out the way Prime Minister Maliki expected, even with the help of US air and ground support. So now Maliki has gone to Plan B to get the Mahdi Army to surrender their weapons: bribery financial incentives.
Iraq’s prime minister has extended a deadline for Shia militants in Basra to hand over their weapons by more than a week, in an attempt to defuse the violence that rocked the southern city this week.
Nouri al-Maliki said the deadline would be extended from Saturday to Tuesday April 8 and said militants would receive a financial reward if they complied.
“All those who have heavy and intermediate weapons are to deliver them to security sites and they will be rewarded financially. This will start from March 28 to April 8,” the prime minister said.
Well, if you can’t kill them all, maybe you can buy them off. It smacks of desperation, though. Considering Maliki has staked his reputation on driving the forces of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, out of Basra so his own supporters and political allies could reap the benefits of controlling the port from which 1.5 million barrels of Iraq’s oil is exported daily, this isn’t exactly a sign of strength on his part. Indeed, his failure to quickly dispose of the Mahdi Army in Basra is ballooning into a major crisis. Mahdi Army militia fighters have also seized control of Nasiriya and Shatra, according to Reuters. Baghdad is under a 24 hour curfew, and the US military is engaged in fighting in and around Sadr City:
(cont.)
In Baghdad there have been clashes in at least 13 mainly Shi’ite neighbourhoods, especially Sadr City, the vast slum named for the cleric’s slain father where his followers maintain their power base.
“There have been engagements going on in and around Sadr City. We’ve engaged the enemy with artillery, we’ve engaged the enemy with aircraft, we’ve engaged the enemy with direct fire,” said Major Mark Cheadle, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad.
Muqtada al-Sadr has called for negotiations with Maliki’s government to end the crisis, but so far the Prime Minister seems to be determined to follow through on his plan to weaken the Sadrists as a political and military rival in advance of the Iraqi provincial elections this Fall. Juan Cole at Informed Comment is of the opinion that this current offensive by Maliki was either approved in advance by the Bush administration, or a direct result of Vice President Cheney’s advice to Maliki after his most recent visit to Baghdad:
My reading is that the US faced a dilemma in Iraq. It needed to have new provincial elections in an attempt to mollify the Sunni Arabs, especially in Sunni-majority provinces like Diyala, which has nevertheless been ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. But if they have provincial elections, their chief ally, the Islamic Supreme Council, might well lose southern provinces to the Sadr Movement. In turn, the Sadrists are demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, whereas ISCI wants US troops to remain. So the setting of October, 2008, as the date for provincial elections provoked this crisis. I think Cheney probably told ISCI and Prime Minister al-Maliki that the way to fix this problem and forestall the Sadrists coming to power in Iraq, was to destroy the Mahdi Army, the Sadrists’ paramilitary. Without that coercive power, the Sadrists might not remain so important, is probably their thinking. I believe them to be wrong, and suspect that if the elections are fair, the Sadrists will sweep to power and may even get a sympathy vote. It is admittedly a big ‘if.’
This would seemingly make sense. Maliki’s government likely would not survive the withdrawal of American forces. The Sadrist movement has always opposed the American occupation, and thus is considered an enemy by the Bush administration. US forces have in the past targeted the Mahdi Army and the result has always led to increased violence without any demonstrable diminution of Muqtada al-Sadr’s power. Petraeus seemed to have adopted a new strategy of letting sleeping dogs lie regarding the Sadrists while attempting to pick them off a little bit at a time, but perhaps Cheney and Bush, or Maliki, forced his hand and made him agree to support Maliki’s foces in their attempt to eradicate the Mahdi Army in Basra.
In any event, it seems clear that we have taken sides in an internal conflict between the two most powerful Shi’ite factions. The Maliki government is corrupt, autocratic, murderous (particularly with respect to the Sunnis) and distrusted by the many Iraqis as a mere puppet of the Americans, but as long as US forces remainy in Iraq he and his faction, which ironically has close ties with Iran, will continue to control Iraq’s government.
Which goes to show that the surge has essentially accomplished nothing. The same ethnic, sectarian and internecine political divisions which have plagued Iraq since we deposed Saddam’s regime still exist in spades, with no political solution in sight. Indeed, as the open conflict between Maliki’s supporters and the Sadrists makes clear, those divisions have only worsened. At best, the surge has been merely a temporary propaganda victory for the Bush administration thanks to fawning reporting by the US media which tends to equate diminished levels of violence in Iraq as the only metric to judge the success or failure of Bush’s policies.
From a strategic standpoint the surge has always been doomed to unravel since it was not supported by any political effort and/or diplomatic initiatives on the part of President Bush to bring about a negotiated political settlement that could be agreed upon by all the parties which represent the myriad divisions in Iraqi society, and which share responsibility for Iraq’s internal strife. Instead, Bush has tied America’s fortunes in Iraq ever tighter to those of Maliki and his allies, who have no incentive to bring Sunnis or rival Shi’ites into a government which they now control.
Sooner or later major violence was bound to break out again in Iraq, because nothing has been done to settle the differences between the various factions, ethnic, religious and political, which hold sway over the people of that divided nation. If not Shi’a vs. Shi’a conflict, as we are seeing now, it would have been Sunni vs. Shi’a, or even Kurd vs. Arab (and Turkomen) in Northern Iraq. There is simply no agreement among these competing groups regarding sharing power, issues of regional autonomy, reconstruction, security, reconciliation or the division of oil revenues. To pretend otherwise, as President Bush and John McCain have done recently in the speeches they have given, is to divorce oneself from reality.
Eventually, the current crisis between the Sadrists and Maliki’s government will end, though likely without any definitive resolution of the underlying issues that divide the two. However, the overarching problems that roil Iraq will not be resolved, and no amount of US forces on the ground there, or happy talk by our leaders over here, will change that fact. To steal a metaphor from Atrios, there are no ponies to be found in Iraq. There will be no Hollywood “happy ending” to the reckless and illegal military venture which a deceitful and arrogant President chose to foist upon a fearful and vengeful American public. There is only the choice to be made as to whether we should continue to occupy Iraq for the indefinite future, or whether we should begin the process of ending that occupation.
We cannot control the destiny of Iraq through the indefinite application of our military might. Bad things will happen regardless of the choice we make. The only question is whether we will continue to be a party to the death, destruction and chaos which were the inevitable consequence of Bush’s hubris, or whether we will choose to end our vain and meaningless involvement in Iraq, and allow the Iraqis to resolve their political differences without any interference from us. Until the occupation of Iraq ends that cannot and will not occur.
* The title is a satirical reference to President Bush’s statement that the current outbreak of violent conflict between Maliki’s government and the Sadrists is a “positive” development.
.
Just a few hundred followers in 2004!
Al-Sadr has always been an irritant for his unwillingness to co-operate with the American forces, but it was the closing of his newspaper in late March 2004 that lit the fuse. After protests and the arrest of one of his supporters, al-Sadr said the demonstrations were not working and he urged his supporters to terrorize their enemies.
August 2004 – U.S. siege of Najaf
● U.S. spokesman Major General Bregner: “The actions are not against the Mahdi army”
● Violence in Basra rooted in oil smuggling
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
While I agree with your conclusions, the question I can’t find an answer for in all this political quagmire, is how this “we” you refer to is going to get itself out of Iraq?
Clinton and Obama are not talking complete withdrawal, but more along the lines of withdrawing down to 40,000 to 50,000 troops who will remain to “protect” the bases (not “permanent” of course, just not set to be dismantled at any particular date). What we’ve been witnessing is increasing air “support” similar to the tactics in Vietnam, only these folks aren’t Buddhists, and they have their own intractable, centuries old nefarious feuds just waiting to be “resolved” in their own unique ways. One of those ways appears to be a Daisy Chain of shifting support of the different groups for each other, with some of the Sunnis who have been targeted by Sadr’s Mehdi people, driven from their homes in Baghdad, somewhat aligning with the Mehdi against Maliki and ISCI who want Sadr and his large political following defused by this new version of an ever brewing civil war.
(Americans’ conceptual problems are anchored in the cognitive drawback that they can culturally only conceive of binary oppositions for a civil war, so much of this is beyond the media’s ability to express.)
Drawing down to lower troop numbers Democrat candidates are willing to acknowledge, bunkered down in the five or six “indefinitely” established bases, will be contingent on whatever circumstances happen to be in place, circumstances determined by politically impossible to resolve, and never ending differences, and I’d wager whoever is in the White House will find those contingencies unacceptable to the ordering of a stand down, since the stand up by any strong enough group of Iraqis is not likely — unless that president happens to be McKinney or Nader, and what’s the chance of that? (That’s rhetorical, no one needs to answer that.)
Meanwhile, this administration’s wrecking ball continues to swing, and we are headed into a possible if not probable depression before it’s lame duckness is finally, mercifully ended, since the other means of ending it is off the table.
: Rebuilding the American Economy, Bush-style -By Tom Engelhardt
I agree that no one will get us out of Iraq immediately. However, any draw down of forces will be an improvement and will begin the momentum for a complete exit. Unfortunately, based on our past experience in Vietnam, this may take the entire first term of a Democratic administration to accomplish, and that’s if Obama is elected. If it’s Clinton, expect to see us there past 2012.
Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The sooner our exodus from Iraq begins, the better.
If there’s any hope, it would be in the ability of the public to pressure the decision making more than the various elite groups who now control US foreign policy, be they the Neoconservative idealists or the realists, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Obama’s advisers, and of course the architect of the Carter Doctrine, which set the stage for the US’s present “interest” in the Middle East, a very deeply embedded interest in US bureaucracy as well as the monied interests that are involved in the global economy, the implicit interconnection with the US empire of bases.
Policy doesn’t necessarily progress in a linear, step by step fashion, it is somewhat more determined by circumstances which can’t be predicted, and a strange kind of momentum that traps policy making in these already ongoing policies, like the one’s that keep the military industrial complex intact by Congressional fears of change, that they seem to imagine keep them voted into office by constituents who want the pork that gives them jobs. Not to mention such anomalies as the President’s self declared War on Terror, which somehow manages to determine much about how long-term domestic policies get enacted, complete with Congressionally designed laws using that concept that the President follows (although the present one doesn’t entirely agree with that notion).
So strategically, I wonder how the public can begin to express a voice, when the voices right now are expressed by the force of money, which appears to be well and strategically placed by key interest groups that have the politicians’ ears better than the public seems to have. A vote isn’t much a voice, and the MSMedia does little more than take dictation from the White House.
insightful post.
Boy, ren, that was depressing.
I was hoping for a cheerier ending. Bush would attack Iran, thereby shutting down all Mideast oil, causing a worldwide depression, bankrupting the U.S., thus ending our occupation.
How’s that pipeline across Afghanistan coming along?
Despite the efforts of the Neoconservatives for a quick demise of the economy on that scale, Bob, I think the realists like Gates have more complicated plans for developing a depression in the next ten months, and one that will be much more difficult to fix by the next administration, which will probably be a Democrat. 🙂
Haven’t checked on that pipeline in awhile. Perhaps the builders are all getting stoned on all the heroin.