Sadr again

For the moment at least, the standoff at the Shiite holy city of Najaf remains just that: a standoff. On Monday, Colonel Dana Pittard, commander of US forces there, said "we can wait," citing the negotiations going on between various Iraqi intermediaries and Moqtada al-Sadr.

However, there are hints that the occupation hierarchy is running out of patience, according to Monday's New York Times.

"They must be dealt with, and they will be dealt with," the administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, said, breaking a week of silence on the confrontation with Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American Shiite cleric, in Najaf and Sunni Muslim insurgents in Falluja. Mr. Bremer spoke of the need to bring an early end to the standoffs, to return Iraq to the political path the United States has mapped out, starting with the formal return of sovereignty on June 30.

Bremer accused the rebels of wanting "to shot their way to power" and appeared, the Times said, to be moving toward a military showdown. A further hint of that could be found in Pittard's comment that

his 2,500-strong force in the area would be replaced in the coming days by around 2,000 soldiers from the 1st Armored Division,

a unit more geared to the kind of assault that taking Najaf would require.

And why not, I say? After all, it's been what, almost two weeks? Just how long do you expect them to wait? (Yes, yes, that is sarcasm. Jeez....)

(Sidebar: Pittard's comment was not included in an updated version of the story.)

Admittedly, Bremer was not the only one expressing doubts about Najaf, according to the Beeb on Sunday.

A spokesman for radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr says there is little hope for a peaceful end to the stand-off....

Qais el-Ghazali said talks between Mr Sadr's supporters and US forces had brought no agreement.

There may be an issue of "too many cooks" here; news reports refer to "several parties, including Iranians," and "various Iraqi intermediaries" in negotiations. In fact, a

senior member of the al-Dawah party, Adnan Ali, who is mediating between US forces and Mr Sadr, told the BBC the negotiations were being held up because too many people were meddling in them.

The inevitable result is that a

senior coalition official, who asked not to be identified, said it was unclear how far negotiations by various Iraqi intermediaries had progressed.

"It's difficult to get a sense of what's real and what isn't," he said.

It actually appears to me that there is some political jockeying for position going on here: Different people, quite possibly with their own agendas, trying to inject themselves into the situation, hoping to be seen as the one(s) responsible for resolving the crisis and thereby elevating their own importance.

That number, of course, includes Sadr himself. He is in a sort of political limbo now, his calls for a general uprising having gone unheeded, his militia devoted more than anything else to protecting him rather than projecting his influence.

But the very fact that he's still there in Najaf, still, apparently, defiant, and still in a position to hold off an attack knowing that the US forces would be blamed for any damage to the holy sites there, gives his voice an authority it would otherwise not have.

(By the way, before I go on I have to retract two things I said about Sadr on Wednesday, one being that he is "at least for the moment a player" and "this recently-small-time fanatic." The fanatic part is true, but the rest of it's not. Sadr has been a player for some time; remember he was the one who turned out thousands of protesters in January against earlier versions of US plans for Iraqi "sovereignty." At the time, he was described as a rival to al-Sistani.)

The thing is,

Iraqi Shia appear divided over the stand-off between Coalition forces and followers of Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr.

Some say they support the fiery cleric, while others wish he'd just give up and go home,

says the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

That ambivalence is apparently too much for some in the blogosphere, who keep insisting "al-Sadr has won" - without, I would add, being too clear about just what it is he's won. There is always a tendency to invest opponents of any stripe with mystical powers of persuasion and influence and give to their actions a depth of calculation and guile impossible to see by mere mortals except in retrospect. (Think, for example, of the reactionaries who used to suggest that a child exposed to a single communist teacher would be hopelessly tainted, that one experience outweighing every other influence in their life - or those who now say the same thing about a homosexual teacher.) Sadr, some would have it, is a master manipulator beyond all master manipulators - surpassing even the Karl Rove of their fantasies. Sadr responds to the closure of his newspaper and the arrest of an aide by unleashing his militia. Brilliant! He pulls back to Najaf. Brilliant! He's conciliatory - brilliant! He's defiant - brilliant! He negotiates - brilliant! He doesn't negotiate - brilliant! He's won! He's won! The idea that he miscalculated and is now trying to sort out the best thing to do - unthinkable.

But the fact is, every sign is that that's exactly what Sadr is doing: making it up as he goes along. And far from having "won," there are influential forces in the Shiite community that are not at all happy with him. Indeed, the top clerics keep him at arm's length (their religious opposition to an attack on Najaf says absolutely nothing at all about what they feel about Sadr) and even local ones express opposition, as noted by the Iraqi Press Monitor for April 15:

(Asharq al-Awsat) - Shia religious leaders in Najaf (Al-Hawza Al-Ilmia) issued an announcement signed by a number of clerics saying they have nothing to do with the positions take by Muqtada al-Sadr or the behaviour of his Mahdi Army.

(London-based Asharq al-Awsat, a pro-Saudi independent paper, is issued daily.)

And on April 19, IPM said:

(Al-Taakhi) - Ayatollah Muhammed Taqi al-Mudarisi warned the opposed groups in Najaf against slipping into war. He also called for dissolution of the Mahdi Army by its merger into the Iraqi Army along with all other militias.

(Al-Taakhi is issued daily by the Kurdistan Democratic Party.)

(IPM is a project of the IWPR.)

Indeed, even other militias are at least potential opponents, and ones not as restrained by political considerations as US forces are.

Sadr loyalists appear to maintain an uneasy peace with the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iran-backed Shiite religious party which is represented on Iraq's coalition-appointed interim Governing Council.

Badr militiamen set up checkpoints at the entrances of Najaf searching thousands of pilgrims streaming into the city and preventing cars from entering.

But, again reflecting the division that Sadr represents, the IPM also noted on the 19th a report from Al-Mutamar, the daily paper of the Iraqi National Congress, that Laith Kubba, head of the Iraqi National Assembly, blamed the Coalition Provisional Authority for the confrontation. He argued it was provoked by political elements in Iraq described by the paper as "unsure of their ability to retain power" in a future Iraqi government because of the opposition that al-Sadr "or other currents" could generate - so they want to push the US "to finish him off as a symbol."

What all this means is that Sadr hasn't "won" anything he didn't have before: a faithful core of followers and a standing as a symbol of more radical resistance to the occupation. While it would be inaccurate to call him a "polarizing figure" - the opposition to him is not as vociferous as his support and consists more of rejection of him and his methods than of his opposition to occupation - it would be accurate to say that his influence exists because of that occupation, not in spite of it. What he has done, or rather the Iraqi reaction to his actions has done, is indicate the depth of that opposition. For the moment, nothing has defused the immediate crisis more than the US simply declining to attack Najaf, not giving him quite as easy an enemy to politically aim at.

Hopefully, that kind of patience will continue. There are still signs pointing both ways. Some toward more bloodshed, such as that fact that

Al-Sadr's spokesman, Sheikh Qais al-Khazaaly, said Sunday that the cleric was "willing to die in Najaf as his father did."

Al-Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammed al-Sadr, and his two older brothers were assassinated by the Saddam regime in 1999.

And these comments by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the coalition forces, were not very comforting:

"We're very sensitive of the holy shrines, as we have always been when we've conducted operations in this country," Sanchez told Australian Broadcasting Corporation television.

"We'll be applying the same levels of constraint that we've always applied in operating in this country and making sure that we respect the people and that we respect their religious shrines," he said.

That sounds like it's setting the stage for one of our patented "precision" attacks. Yet on the other hand,

there were signs of movement in efforts to resolve the coalition's standoff with Sadr peacefully.

The Dawa party, another mainstream Shiite religious faction, said Sunday its representatives held a "positive" meeting with the coalition.

"We met (coalition civil administrator Paul) Bremer. We feel that this contact was positive and that the coalition is prepared to resolve the crisis peacefully," said Adnan Ali al-Kazem, an aide to party chief Ibrahim Jaafari.

He said Dawa planned to meet with Sadr Monday to discuss how to revive the negotiations.

As long as the guns are more or less stilled, there is a chance.

Just a chance.

Update: Edited to clean up some sloppy language.