Ray of Hope
Aug 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am by Susie
It would be wonderful if this works. We’ll see:
BAGHDAD — Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.
The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.
Recently, however, the group has been hit by a largely successful Iraqi military crackdown against militia members operating as criminal gangs. At the same time, Mr. Sadr’s popular support is dwindling: Residents who once viewed the Mahdi Army as champions of the poor became alienated by what they saw as its thuggish behavior.
A new brochure, obtained by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Mr. Sadr’s chief spokesman, Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, states that the Mahdi Army will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy. The group will focus on education, religion and social justice, according to the brochure, which is aimed at Mr. Sadr’s followers. The brochure also states that it “is not allowed to use arms at all.”
Susie, all this means is that al Sadr is learning.
That’s the same thing that Hisbullah did. Except that they kept the guns, of course. They simply took them out of the hands of glorified streetgangs, radically downsized their militia, and trained the ones they kept like professionals. Because that’s what they were intended to be.
What resulted from this whittling down was the force that stopped the IDF butt-cold at the Lebanese border just over two years ago.
The way I figure it, al Sadr doesn’t need the Mahdi Army as such anymore, because the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad is an accomplished fact, for all intents and purposes. For something like that, you’ll use large numbers of thugs, pure and simple. If you want to play hit and run games with the US Army and Marines, indefinitely, you’ll need bothfar better quality and far smaller quantity.
Competently employed Auftragstaktik beats competently employed befehlstaktik. all other things being equal. But in order to employ auftragstaktik, you need noncoms who can be trusted like they’re generals. That’s why the Wehrmacht couldn’t use it very well in the later stages of WW II: they were burnt out and their ultra-competent core was mostly corpses scattered all over Russia.
Al Sadr is cutting off the fat from the bone.
He’s also replicating another thing Hisbullah did to win allegiance all over South Lebanon: he’s replacing the non-functional government. He’s going into the business of providing what a healthy nation-state’s government usually provides: emergency and essential services, schools, a safety net for the poor, and all the rest of the infrastructure. After his people (among others) went to great lengths to hollow out that government.
If this analysis is accurate, then of course, that’s where he’s going to invest most of his people now. And the ones tasked with this will need guns the way a fish needs a bicycle.
In other words, this is probably an endgame. Moqtada al-Sadr is simply running himself for the job of Boss of Iraq. Just like so many people (including lefties like Steve Gilliard) always figured he’d do. And this is the next logical step. It’s time.
Nouri al Maliki knows this, too. That’s why he’s been rattling the cages of the neocons inside the DC Beltway. He’s trying for legitimacy himself, in the only way open to him: at least to visibly try to shove the US (whom absolutely everybody except it’s direct Iraqi hires loathes beyond expression) right out of the country.
I came back to this after I read Bill Lind’s latest: On War #272: A Deeper Global Crisis. Bill is a bit of a paleocon dinosaur, but his thinking about military affairs is about two paradigm shifts ahead of the Army’s.