Blink

As best I can tell, the murderous intra-sectarian conflict in Southern Iraq has been all about pre-election positioning. Moqtada Sadr’s people have the economically critical port city of Basra by the throat and stood ready to increase their parliamentary representation throughout the Shia heartland via the same sort of violent intimidation they had used in the deep south. This is not a question which US audiences should view disinterestedly: Nouri al Maliki’s government rules the government and Iraqi army through a potentially transitory electoral legitimacy, while Sadr’s Jaish al Mahdi militiamen – which has thoroughly penetrated the Ministry of Internal Security – earn their power through the barrel of an illegitimate gun.

On the pretext of rooting out criminal gangs, Maliki used his government’s moral monopoly on organized violence to protect his political flanks from an election stolen by Sadrist thugs. In response, Sadr’s JAM engaged Maliki in a test of military and social strength. As more provinces are transitioned from coalition to Iraqi control, and in anticipation of an eventual withdrawal of most US forces, this was perhaps inevitable but the timing was fortuitous for Maliki’s people: Forcing the Sadrists into fixed lines of defense while substantial coalition combat power remained in place gave them proxy control of coalition air power, making the fight hideously expensive for the defenders.

It’s an auspicious time from a political perspective as well: One senses that the Maliki government would be perfectly content to have the US national election in November dominated by economic questions rather than the image of his country aflame. Domestic US political attention is now focused on the agonies of Democratic Party presidential nomination process and a looming recession. If Maliki can fashion a military victory while those stories play out, he may calculate that his Basra campaign – and it is “his”, no other explanation for his presence on the battle front makes sense – will have faded from the collective memory of the US electorate by November. Sadr realizes this too of course, which is at least partly why his fighters clung so tenaciously to their neighborhoods even in the face of withering fire.

In the event, it seems that Sadr may have called off his dogs:

Moqtada Sadr’s statement said: “Because of the religious responsibility, and to stop Iraqi blood being shed, and to maintain the unity of Iraq and to put an end to this sedition that the occupiers and their followers want to spread among the Iraqi people, we call for an end to armed appearances in Basra and all other provinces.

“Anyone carrying a weapon and targeting government institutions will not be one of us.”

You’re on your own, in other words.

This is not the first time that Sadr has blinked. He pulled back from Najaf to regroup after his partisans were cruelly mauled in 2004, and again famously last year when he called for a cease-fire after an intramural scrum in the south turned nasty, costing the lives of hundreds of his co-confessors.

Sadr wants two things – he wants political power, and he wants the US-led coalition out of his country, both for reasons of nationalist pride and because they represent a significant obstacle to his quest for dominance. The questions remaining now are whether he has sufficient control over his militiamen to call them off, and whether this is in fact a military defeat for his forces leading to a legitimate political competition of ideas or merely a chance to reculer pour mieux sauter at some more favorable time.