Is Disabling JAM a Good Idea?
Joshua Foust on Apr 07 2008 at 8:30 am | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Notes on the war
Lost in the hoopla over the intra-Shia fighting in Iraq is a rather fundamental question: is it even a good idea? Is it something we should be poking our fingers into? Augustus Norton, a professor of International Relations at Boston University, is not so sure:
I remember sitting in Beirut with an old friend about the time of the invasion. He was a shrewd observer (and a Shi’i Muslim), who I had known for decades. He was happy to see Saddam toppled, but he was distressed by how poorly prepared the US was to deal with Iraq. He said, despite the mistakes, this will be ok provided the US does not alienate the Shi’a in Iraq. “If you do that, then it is all over.”
Muqtada al-Sadr sits atop a mobilized underclass community that is too unwieldy to encompass in a well-integrated party, and he is not the greatest leader, but he does have unique authority as a sayyid (or descendant of the Prophet), as the son and former aide of Ayatollah M. Sadiq al-Sadr and as part of a distinguished clerical family with branches in Lebanon and Iran, as well as Iraq. He alone can sit atop the volcano. If he loses control, then Katie bar the door…
Our political dilemma is that our Iraqi Shi’i “friends” don’t have the popular base that Muqtada does, not are likely to any time soon.
Indeed, the deeper, more ideological ties with Iran of ISCI and the Badr Brigades—which form primary components of Maliki’s political base—are often left aside in the more Kagan-esque commentaries on the fighting. It is not an unalloyed good; even though Maliki is the official government of Iraq, we are not well served by helping a minority Shia faction defeat a majority Shia faction—especially if we’re helping to further entrench those beholden to Iran. What’s even worse, Iran has proven it is the real mediator of peace in the country: the first round of fighting in Basra was brokered in Iran, not the Green Zone. Both sides now look East, rather than West, to resolve their problems.
This is not good news.
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Thing is, if the current news of Sunnis and Kurds working with Maliki’s government to end “militias” is correct (seen here
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_ISOLATING_THE_SADRISTS?SITE=NVREN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT,) then this could be good news if Sadr takes the opportunity to work with his old “nationalist” Sunni allies to curb the influence of the Badr Brigades as well.
This is, as always with Iraq, a qualified conjecture, and will likely end up with a muddied half-assed result…
What does this move by the Sunnis and Kurds look like to you Josh?
It looks like a move to curb Sadr’s power to me. The trick is, Sadr doesn’t like having his power curbed. And I’m curious what the Sunni factions are giving up to get the Kurds on their side—there are few warm feelings amongst the lot.