Unable to Beat Muqtada al-Sadr, the U.S. Tries to Divide his Movement

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.