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.
