Baiting the bear. Reading today's lead (Jeffrey Gettleman and Douglas Jehl, "Fierce Fighting With Sunnis and Shiites Spreads to 6 Iraqi Cities"), a statement from Moktada al-Sadr caught my eye:

In a statement issued Tuesday from Najaf, [al-Sadr] urged disciples to keep up the fight.

"America has shown its evil intentions," Mr. Sadr said, "and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it. They must defend their rights by any means they see fit."

He also aligned himself with Iraq's most influential religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. "I proclaim my solidarity with Ali Sistani, and he should know that I am his military wing in Iraq," he said.

My immediate thought was, this guy is a pretty smart and pretty ballsy political tactician. Whether or not Sistani actually wants a military wing, I think it's safe to say he really doesn't want a Sadrist military wing. But al-Sadr has adroitly, and rapidly, maneuvered himself into a position where he may very well be able to force Sistani to swallow this little poison pill.

And, as we know, fortune favors the prepared:

Months ago, some of Mr. Sadr's rivals said he had only a few hundred armed men behind him. Hazim al-Aarji, Mr. Sadr's chief commander in Khadamiya, maintains there are 50,000 members of the Mahdi Army just in Baghdad. Mohammed Kadem, a 23-year-old Mahdi Army fighter from Khadamiya, said the force had been lying quietly for months, with arms they looted nearly a year ago. "We just kept them in our homes," Mr. Kadem said. "We knew this time might come."

Mr. Kadem detailed a training program in which he and other Shiite youths took buses to Sadr City to practice marksmanship in an open field. Marching orders are disseminating through mosques, Mr. Kadem explained, and ammunition is supplied by central offices.

Jeffrey Gettleman, "At Word of U.S. Foray, a Baghdad Militia Erupts"

Even abstracting whatever partisan exaggeration there may be in this, certainly the evidence of the last few days makes it obvious that a significant Sadrist infrastructure—one that coalition intelligence apparently had little if any knowledge of—has been in place for some time now, biding its moment.

It starts to occur to me that there's been quite a lot of fortune in this, all of it going in al-Sadr's direction. His newspaper is shut down, and he needs less than a week to respond to the provocation with a coordinated uprising? Which rolls into place just prior to the start of the politically charged Shiite festival of Arbain, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a festival that finds hundreds of thousands of Shiite faithful pilgrimaging to Karbala and the Sadrist stronghold, Najaf? This, from Doug Jehl's article today:

A senior Defense Department official who outlined the likelihood of a slower approach said American concerns had been complicated by two dates now approaching — an anniversary and a holiday.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of the killing of Mr. Sadr's father, a leading cleric, and his two elder brothers, deaths that occurred under the rule of Saddam Hussein. And Friday is the first day of the Shiite religious festival of Arbayeen, which will bring hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims to the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

And let's not forget that this all comes conveniently in the midst of a major, scheduled American troop rotation in Iraq, and thus at a time of maximum tactical opportunity for any opposition.

Given the level of intelligence evident in the Sadr organization—and, sadly, the level of intelligence evident among Proconsul Jerry's bunch—the question of timing just begs to be asked. Bloggers have been wondering, like Lambert here, what American agenda was served by the CPA shutting down the Sadrist paper, then revealing a months-old arrest warrant against al-Sadr. The assumption has always been that, whatever the CPA was up to, they managed to force al-Sadr's hand. I can't help wondering whether the vice isn't versa, whether it isn't al-Sadr who took a chance—very successfully—at making his own luck. [One suggestion, whose source I can't recall right now, was that Administration neo-cons found al-Sadr's announced embrace of Hezbollah and Hamas too infuriating to be allowed to go unchallenged.] Did al-Sadr, seeing a window of opportunity, bait the bear, and give himself a pretext for creating the chaos he's now working to take advantage of?

posted by michael  5:04:03 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

And I get to wear these cool combat boots with my suit, too! Douglas Jehl reports a new—as in, concocted in the past day—resolution on the part of the American authorities to "move slowly in carrying out any retaliation against Moktada al-Sadr" (a resolution events seem to have already made superfluous):

In seeking to portray Mr. Sadr as a criminal, American officials in Baghdad disclosed for the first time on Monday that a secret warrant for his arrest was issued months ago by Iraqi authorities in connection with the killing of Ayatollah Khoei last April, shortly after he was returned to Iraq by American military forces.

In describing the warrant, American officials indicated that a decision had been made to seize Mr. Sadr soon, with a spokesman, Dan Senor, saying there would be "no advance warning."

But the American officials in Baghdad declined to say when they would execute the warrant.

"U.S. Says It Won't Move Quickly Against Sadr"

Jehl's doing Senor a favor by presenting that quote the way he does. John Burns was at that press conference, and his article yesterday was cruel enough—and deadpan enough—to offer Senor in full feather:

"You'll know," replied Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the spokesman for the American command, when asked when the bid to arrest Mr. Sadr would be made. "Yeah, let's just say there will be no advance warning," said Dan Senor, the spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq.

"U.S. Seeks Arrest of Shiite Cleric"

Isn't that "Yeah" just exactly the cry of the red-breasted American chickenhawk? I can hear the snigger in Senor's voice when he makes his "no advance warning" quip. And without a word on his own, Burns skewers Senor precisely, as one of those nauseating GOP wannabes who can't ever get enough of hearing themselves talk like hard guys.

posted by michael  3:48:53 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Godspeed. John Burns, with a photographer and an armed escort (supplied by whom, you have to wonder?), was detained on his way to a news conference he thought was being held by Moktada al-Sadr in Kufa yesterday. He takes the opportunity to report on the fervor, and lack of martial discipline, among al-Sadr's militiamen:

A reporter and photographer for The New York Times had a rare — and unplanned — opportunity to see Mr. Sadr's battle troops up close on Tuesday. A 100-mile drive from Baghdad for a supposed news conference by Mr. Sadr ended up with no news conference, and a handful of the newspaper's Baghdad staff, including drivers, security guards and an interpreter, detained for nearly eight hours. They were suspected, their captors said, of being Special Forces operatives or intelligence agents for the United States, Spain or Israel.

But before and after being driven away blindfolded to a makeshift prison deep in the semidesert landscape outside Kufa, the visitors were left under loose guard at the mosque's main entrance and, for about an hour, inside the courtyard. There, seething antagonism for Westerners blended with a haphazard, almost chaotic approach to maintaining control. Hundreds of worshipers made their way into the mosque past groups of men toting Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and a variety of bayonets and knives.

"Anxious Moments in Grip of an Outlaw Iraqi Militia"

[Ignore the headline-writer's parrotating of CPA propaganda in the word "outlaw": it's not seconded anywhere in the report.] The best Times writing so far from Iraq, like Burns' piece today, has been relegated to the inner pages. Before work caught up with me yesterday, I meant to point out that both Jeffrey Gettleman, from inside Kufa ("An Incendiary Cleric Braces His Militia for an Invasion"), and Christine Hauser, on the streets of Sadr City ("In Shiite Enclave, Cheers Have Turned to Fur"), were doing some extraordinarily sharp reporting in what have to be extremely uncomfortable and increasingly dangerous conditions. Burns' experience underscores that fact, and one hopes they'll all continue safe.

This, to my mind, is what committed, observant journalism looks like, from Hauser's article:

Along Chuwadir Street, which slices through the center of Sadr City, the disenchantment and fury about the continued military occupation, the lack of jobs and the instability indicated that the United States may have lost the hearts of a segment of the population it had perhaps initially won over by default.

"The Americans have no more business here," said Juma Majed, 40.

Around him were signs of what happens when war is taken to the doorsteps of a rundown slum teeming with people.

Six American tanks were lined up at a busy intersection, their turrets swinging languidly from side to side as cars and trucks honked and tried to outmaneuver each other to take up what little was left of the intersection. City buses packed with passengers pulled over to the side to make room for passing tanks.

Little girls with schoolbags and old women with vegetable sacks walked past the tanks, guarding a police station that the militiamen had tried to take over.

American soldiers crouched behind concrete blocks, their weapons trained on a huge crowd of Iraqi onlookers, who stood in crowds across the street and stared.

Hand-painted lettering on an abandoned sidewalk juice stand extolled the virtues of apricot nectar. Above the writing, bullet holes shattered the glass. Casings littered the street and greasy coils of rubber, all that was left of burning tires, were plastered in the road.

"What kind of democracy is this?" said Sheik Walid Hassan.

posted by michael  12:43:13 PM  
tell me about it []