Riding The Tiger

Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraqsince the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the religious andpolitical movement of the impoverished Shia underclass whose lives were ruinedby a quarter of a century of war, repression, and sanctions.

From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of SaddamHussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated him. Sofar from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media oftendescribed him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his followers.

A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo

Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring upunexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have happened toMuqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their political and religiousplatform had a continuous appeal for the Shia masses. From the moment Saddam wasoverthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated from his open opposition to the U.S.occupation, even when a majority of the Shia community was prepared to cooperatewith the occupiers.

As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew among theShia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of Shia thoughtthat the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security situation worse, and55% believed their departure would make a Shia-Sunni civil war less likely. TheU.S. government, Iraqi politicians, and the Western media habitually failed torecognize the extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politicsand, in the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.

All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supportedSaddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly loyalSpecial Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis were deeplyconscious that their country sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves,but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like ability to make catastrophic errorsin peace and war had reduced the people to a state in which their children werestunted because they did not get enough to eat.

The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-beexploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the same furypossessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier in Shia Iraq in thecoming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist movement. Instead, peoplesaw their living standards plummet as provision of food rations, clean water,and electricity faltered. Saddam's officials were corrupt enough, but the newgovernment cowering in the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracycomparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed the loathing with which thegovernment was regarded, and dodged in and out of government, enjoying some ofthe fruits of power while denouncing those who held it.

Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of thishighly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and elderbrothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were assassinated in 1999 hehad 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 andson-in-law of two of Saddam Hussein's most dangerous opponents, he was a primesuspect and his every move was watched.

When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears' politicalinheritance and consciously associated himself with them on every possibleoccasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and Sadr II [Muqtada'sfather-in-law and father, both assassinated by Saddam] against a background ofthe Iraqi flag. There was more here than a leader exploiting his connection to arevered or respected parent. Muqtada persistently emphasized the Sadristideological legacy: puritanical Shia Islam mixed with anti-imperialism andpopulism.

Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement

The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April 2003when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine, Sayyid Majidal-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had often discussed thefuture of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Muqtada himself, which is a matterof dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist supporters in the lynching is provenand 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, sometimescontrolling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and actions were oftenfar apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni against the occupation, yetafter the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006, he was seen asan ogre by the Sunni, orchestrating the pogroms against them and failing torestrain the death squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse that it was "rogueelements" among his militiamen who were carrying out this slaughter is notconvincing, because the butchery was too extensive and too well organized to bethe work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists and the Shia in generalcould argue that it was not they who had originally taken the offensive againstthe Sunni, and the Shia community endured massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda forseveral years before their patience ran out.

Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious leadersunequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on Shia civilians ifhe was to cooperate with them against the occupation. They did not do so, andthis was a shortsighted failure on their part, since the Shia, who outnumberedthe Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq, controlled the police and much of thearmy. Their retaliation, when it came, was bound to be devastating. Muqtada wascriticized for not doing more, but neither he, nor anybody else could havestopped the killing at the height of the battle for Baghdad in 2006. The Sunniand Shia communities were both terrified, and each mercilessly retaliated forthe latest atrocity against their community. "We try to punish those whocarry out evil deeds in the name of the Mehdi Army," says Hussein Ali, theformer Mehdi Army leader. "But there are a lot of Shia regions that are noteasy to control and we ourselves, speaking frankly, are sometimes frightened bythese great masses of people."

American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding ofMuqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul Bremer'sdisastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were persistent attempts tomarginalize him or keep him out of government instead of trying to expand theIraqi government's narrow support base to include the Sadrists. The first twoelected Shia prime ministers, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, came underintense 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, Newsweekadmitted that "Muqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate inIraq." But the best the magazine could do to assist its readers inunderstanding Muqtada was to suggest that they should "think of him as ayoung Mafia don."

Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader whoproponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over from SaddamHussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited, English-speaking exiles who theWhite House had hoped would turn Iraq into a compliant U.S. ally, Muqtada lookedtoo much like a younger version of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq, which ithas never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and hisSunni regime was bound to be followed by elections that would produce agovernment dominated by the Shia allied to the Kurds. It soon became evidentthat the Shia parties that were going to triumph in any election would beIslamic parties, and some would have close links to Iran.

The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in theIran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis"developing in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and paranoiaon the part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted to make Iraq aclient state they would have found the country as prickly a place for Iraniansas it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S. attempt to create an anti-IranianIraq that was to play into Iranian hands and produce the very situation thatWashington was trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its nuclearprogram, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had the potential tostrike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was executed, Sadr I believedthat he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with Tehran; and atfirst Muqtada denounced his Shia opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as beingIranian stooges. But American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look toIran for help, and in a military confrontation the Mehdi Army saw Iran as anessential source of weapons and military expertise.

The New Iraqi Political Landscape

On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada calledfor a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S. occupation and al-Qaedain Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The call was probably sincere, butit was also too late. Baghdad was now largely a Shia city, and people were toofrightened to go back to their old homes. The U.S. "surge" hadcontributed to the sharp drop in sectarian killings, but it was also true thatthe Shia had won and there were few mixed areas left.

The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security wasimproving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were returning.Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the Sunni on anationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never accepted that theirrule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on the same street, they couldhardly share a common identity.

The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the Sunnipopulation turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge," but itwas still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide bombs targetingcivilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare since 2003.The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent groups had turned against al-Qaedaafter it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni community at the end of 2006by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was al-Qaeda'sattempt to draft one son from every Sunni family into its ranks. Sunni withlowly jobs with the government such as garbage collectors were killed.

By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpetingsuccesses 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 bythe United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi government.Muqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi opposition to the U.S.occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had quite different ideas.They wanted to reverse the Shia 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 theAmariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a commander of the U.S.-backedAmariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls Concerned Citizens. His stated objectivesshow that the rise of the new Sunni militias may mark only a new stage in asectarian civil war. "Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed."After we finish with al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main enemy,the Shia militias. I will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area near Amariyataken over by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."

The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to SaddamHussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in Iraq bythe United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his movement. Had hebeen part of the political process from the beginning, the chances of creating apeaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater.

In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play acentral role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of millions of poorShia better than anybody else could have done. But he never wholly controlledhis own movement, and never created as well-disciplined a force as Hezbollah inLebanon. None of his ambitions for reconciliation with the Sunni could take wingunless the Mehdi Army ceased to be identified with death squads and sectariancleansing.

The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violencediminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. Thedifferences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respectivecommunities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as great asever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create confidence amongthe Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he called for unity, would be forthem to be taken back voluntarily into the areas in Baghdad and elsewhere fromwhich they have been driven. But there is no sign of this happening. Thedisintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for the country to exist asanything more than a loose federation.

Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent inLondon. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient of the2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006 James CameronMemorial Award. His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, wasshort-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. Courtesy, TomDispatch.ComThis essay is the last chapter in his new book Muqtada..Copyright© 2008 by Patrick Cockburn. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint ofSimon & Schuster, Inc.