Sadr Probably in Iraq, Not Iran

The Bush Administration is not shy about looking for scapegoats for its own incompetence. I fully expect that any day now Bush will claim that Iran tricked him into starting a war in Iraq. In the meantime, Bush is increasingly pointing fingers at Iran to explain away four long years of White House blunders in Iraq. The Bush Administration now appears to be blaming Iran for harboring Muqtada Sadr, the troublesome Shiite cleric who has launched reprisals against Sunnis who have been attacking Shiites.

Middle East expert Juan Cole of Informed Comment points out that Sadr is probably still in Iraq:

Muqtada al-Sadr is *highly* unlikely to be in Iran.

1. The al-Sadrs, Muqtada and his father, made endless fun of the al-Hakims for fleeing Iraq to Iran under Saddam. Muqtada's claim to greater legitimacy would be undermined were he now to flee to Iran from the Americans.

2. Muqtada successfully hid out from Saddam in Kufa for 4 years. He can hide from the Americans. He has tunnels, safe houses, and trustworthy aides who won't inform on him. He also escaped this way from Najaf and the Marines in Aug. 2004.

(snip)

6. Al-Hayat says he is hiding out in the southern Marshes, also plausible. The Marsh Arabs are now mostly Sadrists.

7. The story of his being in Iran has three sources: Gen. Caldwell of the US military, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Jalal Talabani. All have an interest in Muqtada being humiliated and undermined, and all have an interest in removing his Iraqi nationalist credentials by tying him to Iran. For al-Hakim and Talabani, both with strong Iran ties themselves, it levels the playing field. None is likely actually to know where Muqtada is.

It's worth a reminder that Sunnis have formed the backbone of the insurgency in Iraq for the last four years. Sadr is no innocent; on the other, it's ridiculous to believe the White House has any useful idea what sides to take in the Iraq civil war. In fact, the most dangerous people in Iraq could easily be the Iraqi politicians who tell Americans exactly what they want to hear. Ahmed Chalabi managed to bamboozle any number of neoconservatives with pie-in-the-sky stories about Iraq being a cake walk and Iraqis greeting us with flowers; Chalabi, who spends most of his time in London despite still having a hand in the Iraq government, has done financially very well by telling American right wingers fairy tales about turning Iraq into a secular democracy that would recognize Israel.

We really do need to get out of the mess Bush has made. And of course the McCain Doctrine is not helping matters. The real problem, of course, is that we cannot trust Bush's word or his competence and he has no business expanding the war.

Mistake to Think Bush Can Sort Out Iraq

When it comes to Iraq, the Bush Administration has been wrong about so much that it's ridiculous to believe that as Iraq descends deeper into chaos and as all the complexities of Iraq's ethnic groups, religious groups and tribal groups come to the fore that Bush and Cheney and their top advisers are suddenly going to sort out the mess with an escalation of military force and overcome their usual clumsiness in other areas. Juan Cole of Informed Comment has a post that clarifie a point about the militias:

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno is quoted as saying that 80% of Iraq's militiamen are probably OK and could be put into the Iraqi security forces, while the other 20% may have to be "captured or killed."

This comment seems to me a welcome evidence of realism, much better than the conviction that the Sadr Movement can be defeated militarily. But I fear that the "more extreme" militiamen are the cousins of the ones who are OK, and if you kill the cousin of an Iraqi, he has to kill you to restore clan honor. So if you kill the 20%, you turn the "moderate" militiamen into your deadly enemies. Americans are so individualistic, they can't seem to get their minds around clans and clan feuds. This failure of understanding or imagination has underpinned a lot of the failure in Iraq. What you do is to make a deal with the clan leaders and make them responsible for reining in the extremists, setting things up so that they are denied financial rewards if they fail to do so. Of course this plan depends on your ability to guarantee the safety of the clan leaders, which at the moment the US military cannot do.

We need to pull back, not escalate for the third or fourth time. We need to wind down the war, not let it drag out into the next presidency. We can deal with very specific and very clear military situations and we can do far more with internal and regional negotiations, but behaving like a colonial power at this late stage simply ignores why colonialism went the way of horse and buggies. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney do not have the answers. The Iraqis are going to have to find the answers largely on their own. Increasingly, nothing is more important than keeping our incompetent president from dragging us into a larger conflict.