Please let this be posturing

The words were measured, the intent, it would seem, to be reassuring, when Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling announced on Sunday that

troops will move into a base on the edge of the holy city of Najaf that Spanish troops will abandon when they withdraw from Iraq in the coming weeks. But the Americans will remain away from holy sites - an effort to avoid outraging Iraq's Shiite majority, which opposes any U.S. foray near their most sacred shrine.

Don't worry, the message seemed to be, we're not doing anything provocative, we're only filling a space where troops had already been, a former Spanish base between Kufa and Najaf.

But they just couldn't contain themselves, could they? They just couldn't do it.

Hertling said the move aimed to increase pressure on al-Sadr and his militia.

"It's not going to be large-scale fighting, the likes of other places," he said. But "we're going to drive this guy into the dirt."

Please let this just be posturing for domestic US consumption. Please.

Now, frankly, I suspect it was exactly that, posturing for our benefit. Or at the very least I hope it is, because the alternative is rather too awful. But since the word "patience" does, amazingly, seem to have entered the military vocabulary both in Najaf and Fallujah, and as the generals have learned a rather bloody lesson that they can't just "send in the Marines" and have all opposition fold up and run away, I have some confidence that as long as other events don't intrude and as long as the US political scene is not demanding "action! action!" the blood will stay were it belongs for now, which is inside people's bodies.

In fact, as I noted on Monday,

nothing has defused the immediate crisis more than the US simply declining to attack Najaf,

and that seems even truer now, when the situation is tense but stable and there are signs emerging that Sadr is wearing out his welcome. The Christian Science Monitor says resentment of the militias is "simmering under the surface" in Najaf and quotes the owner of a small textile business this way:

"These militias have become the major obstacle to our prosperity," says Mr. [Nabil] Mahdi. "If Saddam taught us one thing, it's to love peace. And now these people, not the Americans, won't let us have it."

That doesn't mean, CSM notes, "that Najaf's people will soon deal with Sadr on their own." But it does connect to the fact that on

Thursday, a group of 25 tribal leaders issued a statement in Najaf calling on all armed groups in the city to disband. "We call upon you to leave matters to Iraqi officials and legitimate authorities so that the blood of innocent people is not shed," the statement said.

[However, i]t's unclear how much influence the statement will have. Iraq's tribes are crucial political factors inside Iraq, but they are not homogenous.

Still, it does indicate that al-Sadr is gradually becoming more isolated. And not just physically in Najaf, but generally politically:

[T]he Advisory Council in Karbala asked for an end of any militarisation in the city, and of efforts to change mosques and other places of worship into military, party, or sectarian headquarters. Observers understood this as a message to followers of Muqtada al-Sadr who gather in mosques.

That from al-Mashriq, published daily by Al-Mashriq Institution for Media and Cultural Investments, as relayed by the Iraqi Press Monitor for Thursday.

So what does all this mean? Is Sadr "finished?" Has the US "won?" No, of course not, in fact the words are meaningless in this context. What is clear is that Sadr overplayed his hand and the choice now is between giving him a way out and marking ourselves in the eyes of Iraqis as being even more of brutes and Crusaders than we already appear.

This is what I said about Sadr oh so long ago, on April 8:

I expect that the fighting will die down, perhaps with some face-saving agreement about releasing people seized "now that the situation is stabilized" and a vaguely-worded guarantee to Sadr about there being "no plans to take him into custody at the present time." For his part, I think that Sadr is going to realize that in the absence of that non-occurring general uprising, his people are going to be ground down - slowly, perhaps, but still ground down - by the sheer mass of the overwhelming numbers and firepower they face. I see him announcing an end to the fighting in a way that doesn't constitute any sort of surrender, perhaps something along the lines of "we have bloodied the enemy's nose, let us give him a chance to consider his error," at which point his militia melts back into the general population.

I still expect something along those lines except that it's possible that Sadr has waited too long to call backing off any kind of ceasefire; he'd have to find some other face-saving formulation, perhaps "out of respect for the expressions of concern of religious leaders and my fellow clerics" or something.

But as I noted then, what's important about Sadr is that he exposed for all to see the deep divisions, the deep distrust, even the deep hatred, among Iraqis for US forces and the US occupation. By attacking Najaf, US forces would only worsen that.

Not attacking will not, however, make it better. Only getting out will do that.