[NYTr] IRAQ: Unable to Defeat Mahdi Army, US Hopes to Divide It

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IPS - Oct 8, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=39565

IRAQ: Unable to Defeat Mahdi Army, U.S. Hopes to Divide It

Analysis by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (IPS) - Although the U.S. military command's frequent
assertions that the primary threat to U.S. forces in Iraq comes from
Iranian meddling, its real problem is that Shiite cleric Moqtada al
Sadr's Mahdi army is determined to end the occupation and is simply too
big and too well entrenched to be weakened by military force. The U.S.
command began trying to enter into a political dialogue with Sadr's
followers in early 2006 and now claims that such a dialogue has begun,
according to a Sep. 12 article by Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times.

And Gen. David Petraeus hinted in his Congressional testimony last
month at the need to negotiate a deal with the Sadrists. Petraeus said
it is impossible to "kill or capture" all the "Sadr militia" and
likened the problem to that of dealing with the Sunni insurgents who
have now been allowed to become local security forces in Sunni
neighbourhoods.

But the George W. Bush administration is not prepared to make peace
with the Mahdi army. Instead it believes it can somehow divide it if it
applies military pressure while wooing what it calls "moderates" in the
Sadr camp. Parker quoted an anonymous administration official last
month as suggesting that there were Sadrists "who we think we might be
able to work with".

A U.S. commander in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, told Parker last
month that Sadrist representatives initiated indirect talks in late
July, which were followed by Sadr's announcement at the end of August
of a six-month hiatus in fighting.

But the proposal Frank made to the Mahdi army at a meeting Sep. 3 with
both Sunni and Shiite community leaders suggests that Petraeus is on a
short leash in negotiating local peace agreements. Frank proposed that
the Mahdi army cease attacks for two weeks, and that the U.S. military
would "consider reducing their raids in the district".

That was an offer that might have been expected from a newly installed
occupation army rather than from one that has already admitted that it
cannot prevail by using force and is bound to become weaker in the near
future.

The U.S. command intends to increase the military pressure on the Mahdi
army. Last week, Odierno announced that more military resources were
being shifted from fighting against al Qaeda to operations against
Shiite militiamen.

The idea of managing the Mahdi army problem by dividing it between
"extremist" and "moderate" elements was integrated into the original
"surge" strategy. Even before Petraeus took command in Baghdad last
January, he and his second in command, Gen. Ray Odierno, had already
decided to avoid a full-fledged military campaign against the Mahdi
army.

Instead they adopted a strategy of trying to reach agreement with some
of Sadr's followers -- perhaps including Sadr himself -- while
targeting selected elements in the Mahdi army.

"There are some extreme elements, and we will go after them," Odierno
said at a Jan. 7, 2007 news conference.

The strategy of making deals with "moderates" while attacking the
"extreme elements" seemed to be given credibility when Sadr signaled in
early 2007 that he was ordering the Madhi army to lie low and even to
cooperate with the new U.S. Baghdad security plan.

As Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post reported last May, the U.S.
command even released one of Sadr's aides, Salah al-Obaidi, from Camp
Cropper after five months in detention, in the belief that he was a
"moderate" who could help shift the balance within the Madhi army
against those determined to carry out military resistance against U.S.
forces.

But contrary to the self-serving assumptions of Petraeus and Odierno,
Sadr was avoiding a confrontation with U.S. forces because he believed
that the occupation had entered its final phase, in which the Bush
administration would be forced to negotiate a settlement prior to
military withdrawal, and that he had only to keep the Madhi army intact
to emerge victorious over his Shiite rivals associated with the
al-Hakim family.

Sadr aides told Raghavan that the Shiite cleric viewed the Democratic
takeover of Congress and the struggle over Iraq policy as evidence that
the final phase of the war had begun. His expression of willingness to
cooperate with U.S. forces was aimed at positioning himself to be the
main Iraqi interlocutor for the United States in the transition period.

Significantly, however, Sadr refused to deal with the Bush
administration, believing that the Democrats would take a less
bellicose posture toward his movement.

In any case, Sadr's hopes that the U.S. command might leave the Madhi
army alone were dashed by the aggressiveness of U.S. sweeps in Sadr
City and other Sadr strongholds in Baghdad, which began in January even
before the arrival of additional troops. By mid-March, Sadr had already
begun to backtrack on cooperation with the U.S. occupation troops.

Even as Sadr was returning to open opposition to the U.S. military, the
U.S. command was pushing the line that the Mahdi army was "splintering"
and that attacks on U.S. troops were coming only from "rogue" Mahdi
army elements.

A U.S. military official in Washington told the Associated Press in
late March that some Madhi army figures were "breaking away to attempt
a more conciliatory approach to the Americans and the Iraqi
government", while others were "moving in a more extremist direction".

The key individual in the alleged "extremist" breakaway faction was
said to be Qais al-Khazali, who was Sadr's main spokesman in 2003 and
2004. Khazali and his brother, who had just been captured a few days
before, were leaders of an Iraqi network which had apparently procured
armour-piercing bombs and other weapons for the Madhi army.

In July, the U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, cited
Khazali's alleged testimony under interrogation as supporting the
command's argument that the Iranian Quds Force was creating a
"Hezbollah-like" Shiite pro-Iranian force to do its bidding in Iraq.

But Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for Regional Operations
at the Joint Staff in Washington, had obviously not been consulted
about the Khazali breakaway ploy. In a press briefing on Mar. 30,
Barbero said, "[W]e assess that there are links between these brothers
and Sadr's organisation."

Bergner's portrayal of the Khazali organisation as detached from Sadr's
movement was an example of how the U.S. command embraces
interpretations that serve its political-military objectives, even when
they don't reflect its own intelligence judgments.

When the U.S. command carried out arrests of Mahdi army commanders or
cell leaders last spring and summer, they invariably referred to the
targets as "rogue" Mahdi army. In one such operation, U.S. and Iraqi
troops captured the commander of what were called a "high-level rogue
Jaysh al-Mahdi commander" of an "assassination cell" of more than 100
members.

But according to a New York Times report Jul. 28, both the head of the
Sadr office in Baghdad and a Sadrist cleric preaching in nearby Kufa
condemned the raid and called for the release of the detainees,
indicating that they are still part of the Madhi army.

The "rogue" designation apparently referred to their resistance to the
occupation, not to their relationship to the Mahdi army command.

The U.S. command's line that Iran is using Hezbollah operatives to
train Shiite militias that had broken away from Sadr was further
discredited when Sadr admitted in an interview with The Independent in
August that his organisation has "formal links" with Hezbollah, has
sent fighters to Lebanon for training and would continue to do so.

[Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst.
His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road
to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.]

(END/2007)