Fake Plastic News

" Remember Moqtada al-Sadr? He's the paranoid Islamist who ordered the murder of his clerical rival early last summer; staged deadly ambushes of Americans in Baghdad last fall; and ignited a full-scale insurrection prosecuted by his "Mehdi Army" this past April. A thoroughly malign force in Iraqi politics, and a man utterly deserving of the "capture or kill" interdict (very belatedly) placed upon him by the CPA. As for the Mehdi Army itself, the CPA had vowed to destroy it.

The fight against Sadr had been going fairly well: his militia was forced to quit several cities, rival Shi'a had begun denouncing and even killing his followers, and the US Army was slowly winning a deliberate battle of attrition pushed into the very heart of the Shi'a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Note that the latter would never have occured without the tacit approval of the non-Sadrist Shi'a power structure. It was a fight we were winning, and an end we were surely going to achieve.

But as with Fallujah, so with Sadr: it appears we are choosing an illusory political solution and abandoning our original stated goals. The BBC reports that the CPA has agreed to suspend offensive operations and drop the arrest warrant against Sadr in exchange for....well, it's unclear what we get in return. BBC says the Mehdi Army will leave Najaf. NYT says that only some of the Mehdi Army will depart. WaPo states only that the Mehdi Army is "pulling back." But where will they go?

Sadr City, of course.

Expect CPA rhetoric shortly on how Najaf, et al., are "secure," and how the "fighting has ended," or something very similar. These things will be presented as victories, as if they were our aims all along. But they weren't: Najaf was never a wholesale city in arms the way Fallujah was, and we had no interest in holding it for its own sake; and our stated aims in this campaign were the death or capture of Moqtada Sadr, and the destruction of the Mehdi Army. Neither of these aims were achieved. This is not victory.

The Mehdi Army remains a force in being. Moqtada al-Sadr walks free. And, as in Anbar province, home of Fallujah, we can expect that the killing will simply shift elsewhere. Another American failure to secure victory begins its slow transformation into a perceived American defeat. Question: are we at all capable of articulating and sticking with a coherent strategic or operational goal? Why not?"