Moqtada redux

It’s time to set some­thing straight that I should have done a while back. In a pre­vi­ous post that pissed a lot of peo­ple off, I said, “Mobs are ter­ri­fy­ing, but they’re rel­a­tively easy to deal with if you’re will­ing to kill a lot of peo­ple and say the hell with world opin­ion.” I would have thought most peo­ple would have real­ized that I was not advo­cat­ing killing a bunch of peo­ple; I was say­ing armed mobs like Sadr’s are fiendishly dif­fi­cult to deal with — unless you’re will­ing to say to hell with what other peo­ple think. Amer­ica and Allawi have shown that, by and large, they don’t care what other peo­ple think. But I didn’t choose words care­fully in the next sen­tence: “The lat­ter is unlikely to be a prob­lem for Allawi and the Amer­i­cans, how­ever; world opin­ion is basi­cally against Moq­tada.” I should have instead said “world opin­ion is not for Moq­tada.” That’s a dif­fer­ent idea that I wrote and that was my mis­take.
What I meant is this: Lib­eral democ­ra­cies, mostly what we call “The West,” are usu­ally pretty uncom­fort­able with things like mass killings and raz­ing holy places. That’s a good way to get peo­ple riled up and why deal­ing with mobs in a jack-booted way is tricky and dif­fi­cult. But what works in the U.S. and Allawi’s favor is the gen­eral unsa­vori­ness of the Mehdi Army. As Juan Cole says, “Arab news­pa­pers don’t usu­ally say so, but the other side of the story is that Muqtada’s mili­ti­a­men are narrow-minded, thug-like puri­tans who impose their power on civil­ians by coer­cion.” He’s absolutely right. As one fighter is quoted by a Salon story, “We will do any­thing to stop the Amer­i­cans. They have sex and drink­ing and other things, and we don’t want this.”
Now, I’m not going to make the argu­ment that they should be killed because they don’t like Brit­ney Spears. I am also not going to say that they don’t have a right to life or to their beliefs. I am going to ask the ques­tion why the West­ern world should be wring­ing its hands about deal­ing deci­sively with a heav­ily armed group of these guys, who are also the chief sus­pects behind a wave of liquor store and CD shop bomb­ings in Bagh­dad and other cities. In any other sit­u­a­tion, they would be con­sid­ered crim­i­nal thugs and most peo­ple would beg­ging the National Guard to come in and restore order. But in the case of Moq­tada, you’d think I’d maligned La Resis­tance of World War II. How dare I call the brave mujahdeen ass­holes and thugs?
Which brings me back to my point. Where is the out­rage and the sym­pa­thy for Moq­tada? I mean, I under­stand the desire to avoid killing peo­ple in mass quan­ti­ties; it’s really for the best that that doesn’t hap­pen. I am against mass killings, period. But where are the crowds and the marches for U.S. out of Najaf or for Moqtada’s brave resis­tance such as those that pre­ceded the war in the West? Where are the denun­ci­a­tions in the U.N. from peo­ple with cred­i­bil­ity on human rights and vio­lence like Ger­many or Canada? I’m not hear­ing them. Or at least, I’m not hear­ing of reports of them.
And here in Iraq, I’d guess that most peo­ple would “sym­pa­thize” with al-Sadr stand­ing up to the hated Amer­i­cans. But do they sup­port al-Sadr him­self? Over­whelm­ingly, no. In a sur­vey (.doc file) done in June by the Iraq Cen­ter for Research and Strate­gic Stud­ies, an Iraqi think tank run by Dr. Sadoun al-Dulame, he found that the per­son Iraqis would most vote for in a pres­i­den­tial race was … Ibrahim al-Jafari, the head of the Islamic Dawa Party (A Shi’a group.) The next most pop­u­lar was “don’t know.” The Shi’a leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq, received 2.1 per­cent of the vote. What did Moq­tada get? 1.1 per­cent. Hell, Sad­dam Hus­sein out­polled al-Sadr, with 1.7 per­cent of respon­dents choos­ing him as their favorite pres­i­den­tial can­di­date.
Would more peo­ple vote for al-Sadr now? Very pos­si­bly. Would it be more than 2 – 3 per­cent? I seri­ously doubt it. Will it change in the future? Undoubt­edly, but to what degree I have no idea.
Al-Sadr’s move­ment gar­ners sym­pa­thy because he’s point­ing his fin­ger at the biggest devil of them all in Iraq — the United States. But that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily trans­late into sup­port for the man him­self. His cause — dri­ving out the U.S. – may be pop­u­lar, but the man and his poli­cies, such as they are, are widely dis­par­aged. Putting down an armed (and mostly unpop­u­lar) rebel­lion isn’t putting the brakes on democ­racy, it’s remov­ing a bar­rier to it.
What the Iraqis do after that is their busi­ness, hope­fully. I’ve been at the national con­fer­ence for the past two days, and it’s a mess, but I hope not an entirely hope­less one. The big par­ties — the PUK, KDP, Islamic Dawa Party, SCIRI and Iraqi National Accord have set up the selec­tion process so that it — surprise! — favors them­selves. And the two biggest par­ties, Dawa and SCIRI are mak­ing a real power play to dom­i­nate the com­ing coun­cil. The reac­tion among the 1,300 del­e­gates to the Islamic putsch? Dis­may and alarm. Most Iraqis from all walks of life really don’t want to live under an Islamic state envi­sioned by the Islamists, among which Moq­tada would proudly place him­self.)
Any­way, the peo­ple who do argue most stren­u­ously are the “hard-core anti-imperialists,” as I rather slop­pily termed them. My apolo­gies. These are — gen­er­ally — the folks who opposed the war, as I did, but who think that pulling out com­pletely is the answer, as I do not. I don’t think they’re really argu­ing in favor of Moq­tada so much as against the U.S. Some­one in one of the com­ments said they favored “self-determination.” Based on anec­do­tal evi­dence — and the poll results above — self-determination would involve some­one rid­ing Moqtada’s ass out of Najaf on a rail and dis­arm­ing his mili­tia. It would also involve get­ting the U.S. out of Iraq and not dam­ag­ing the shrine.
As I said, if Moq­tada and his fol­low­ers get slaugh­tered, I’m con­fi­dent most of the world will make the stan­dard dis­ap­prov­ing noises, but not too much of a fuss. If the shrine is undam­aged (or maybe only a lit­tle bit), it’s a big win for Allawi. If, how­ever, the Imam Ali shrine is dam­aged or worse, that’s an entirely dif­fer­ent story. And a much scarier one. That would inflame mid­dle class and poor alike, unit­ing behind a hatred for the U.S. that could trans­late from resent­ful grum­bling into real action. That’s why al-Sadr is weak with­out the shrine and pow­er­ful inside it. And that’s why this is tricky.
Al-Sadr isn’t that pop­u­lar, except where he exploits the fears and resent­ment of the poor, his vision of Iraq is not that pop­u­lar, he’s been given numer­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties to take part in a polit­i­cal sys­tem that is, while flawed, the only game in town, and he refuses and takes over the holi­est shrine in Islam. An Iraqi reporter in Najaf is telling me the peo­ple of Najaf are fed up with him and want him out because the Mehdi’s are ter­ror­iz­ing them and shoot­ing mor­tars from the top of the mosque. Tell me again why he shouldn’t be dealt with strongly and force­fully if he con­tin­ues to refuse all over­tures of giv­ing him a slice of the polit­i­cal pie? What is the alter­na­tive? Just pulling up stakes and leav­ing?
That’s not such a good idea either.
Say­ing the war should have never hap­pened and feel­ing vir­tu­ous because you were right it is all well and good, but it’s not really a road map to what to do regard­ing Iraq. Because, Iraq is the U.S.’s prob­lem — and it’s a big one. It is the for­eign pol­icy chal­lenge for the U.S. – and the rest of the world — for the fore­see­able future. If this was Viet­nam you could, from a realpoli­tik point of view, let it mud­dle along under a regime of benign neglect. But not here. It’s chaos sit­ting on the second-largest oil reserves in the world. And they don’t even have to be tapped for it to affect you per­son­ally.
Yes, you per­son­ally. Let’s say Moq­tada sur­vives and his move­ment suc­ceeds in dis­cred­it­ing the Allawi gov­ern­ment to such an extent that he resigns or, in des­per­a­tion, asks the United States to leave and invites Moq­tada into some form of power-sharing arrange­ment. He’s a fun­da­men­tal­ist Shi’a who wants to impose an Islamic state on a pop­u­la­tion that would over­whelm­ingly oppose it, as I’ve men­tioned. Or hell, let’s say he dies and his mar­tyr­dom leads to a pop­u­lar rev­o­lu­tion — again, some­thing I think is improb­a­ble, but bear with me for the sake of argu­ment. Call this new Islamic Repub­lic of Iraq Iran-lite.
What would hap­pen next? Well, for one, the best and the bright­est of Iraq’s intel­lec­tu­als and mid­dle class would flee. So you’re mak­ing an already poor pop­u­la­tion poorer. Good for Moq­tada, the poor are his base, appeal­ing as he does to a kind of Islamic pop­ulism. What hap­pens when you make a coun­try impov­er­ished? Right, you cre­ate a breed­ing ground for jihadist ter­ror­ism. It’s already hap­pen­ing among the Sunni extrem­ists of the Anbar province. A very few for­eign fig­ures such as Zar­qawi are inspir­ing native-born Iraqi jihadis. Fal­lu­jah is crawl­ing with them.
Next, the Kurds would prob­a­bly fight a civil war to get out of such a state. That’s one of the rea­sons they’re so adamant about the veto clause in the TAL – and why the Shia groups were so adamant to have it in. An inde­pen­dent Kur­dis­tan would almost surely ignite a regional war involv­ing Turkey and Iran. It would also deny the uni­fied Islamic Repub­lic of Iraq a lot of oil rev­enues from the Kirkuk region. The Mul­lahs of Bagh­dad would not let region go peace­fully.
So now you have a fun­da­men­tal­ist state that may not be offi­cially ter­ror­is­tic, but has cre­ated the con­di­tions for ter­ror­ism to grow, and there’s a regional war being fought right on top of much of the world’s oil sup­ply. Can you say $60 a bar­rel? Maybe higher? $100?
Now, bemoan Amer­i­can depen­dence on Mid­dle East oil all you want — I cer­tainly do — but for the medium term, we need it. As does Europe and Japan — even more than the United States does. Oil prices at $45 a bar­rel are already pro­duc­ing a drag on the United States econ­omy; even higher rates would send the world econ­omy into a tail spin. And what hap­pens when China can’t afford Mid­dle East oil? Well, those Sprat­ley Islands look mighty invit­ing.
So now the U.S. is faced with two bla­tantly hos­tile regimes strad­dling the Gulf and the sub­ver­sive Saudi regime, all con­trol­ling 20 – 25 per­cent of the world’s oil sup­ply. Your heat­ing bills will go through the roof, for one. Like­wise, your elec­tric­ity bill. For­get about dri­ving that car every­where, and hell, you prob­a­bly won’t have a job to drive to, since the energy costs are caus­ing com­pa­nies to cut costs every­where. Trans­porta­tion costs are higher, so the goods you need to buy and the food you eat will cost a lot more — which is prob­lem since you lost your job. Etc., etc. You get the point.
So there is a domino the­ory at work here, as I think I’ve pointed out — just not the one the neo­cons envi­sioned. I’m not say­ing it’s right to ignore the masses or urban poor, only that it hap­pens. I’m not say­ing it’s right to kill a lot of peo­ple whether they’re poor or rich, but some­times it’s nec­es­sary. It’s tragic that the poor are too often the vic­tims, how­ever.
I’m say­ing that defeat­ing al-Sadr’s aims to impose an Islamic state either through diplo­macy or through mil­i­tary action, which would be highly dis­taste­ful and prob­a­bly a pyrrhic vic­tory, is really the only option left to Allawi and the Amer­i­cans. And the fact that that’s not really a choice at all is a tragedy too.

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