Thoughts on recent developments

It's said that the actual level of support for Moqtada Sadr, who's described as "radical cleric Moqtada Sadr" so often that there must be people think the adjectives are actually part of his name, is small, perhaps just 600 hardcore followers out of the tens of millions of Iraqis. It's also been noted that his religious status is low, giving him accordingly less influence than more senior - and moderate - Shiite leaders. Both are very likely true.

And both are entirely irrelevant.

The first thing that is relevant and important about Sadr is that his supporters are ready and willing to take up arms against targets that he indicates. It's his al-Mahdi ("the Messenger") Army, a militia that numbers from perhaps 3,000 to as many as 10,000 that's responsible for the intensified violence directed against occupation forces (and not just American ones) in central and southern Iraq.

Sadr's followers are disaffected, angry, driven, and they seem eager to feel the sense of power and control that violence can bring. They respond readily to his declarations that "America has shown its evil intentions and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it." He tells them they "must defend their rights by any means they see fit" and they reply by circulating calls to "terrorize the enemy."

Sheik Abu Mahdi al-Rubaie, a 35-year-old al-Sadr follower at the mosque, warned that any U.S. move against al-Sadr would be "a very dangerous thing."

"They will pay a heavy price. ... We are ready to lay down our lives for al-Sayed," he said, using the Arabic word for "master" to refer to al-Sadr.

What I'm saying, in short, is that they are burning with frustration-driven fury, unafraid, and feel they have nothing to lose.

The other thing relevant and important about Sadr is that he is a Shiite.

Until now, armed resistance has at least pretty much all come from Sunnis, whose hatred for the US and its allies after a year of humilating occupation is intense. It's clearly visible in the aftermath of attacks, that is, in the celebrations, celebrations that are not even those of satisfaction in winning but go well beyond into what can only be called gloating: pleasure taken not so much in victory for your side as in humiliation for the other.

I recall reading a while ago that the existence of funerary practices was one of the things that marked the emergence of a culture, that is, one of the things that defined culture was a means of dealing with death. Most cultures - perhaps all, maybe some anthropoligist can confirm that for me - have some tradition of respect for the dead, some rite associated with death. To violate those rites, to violate the dead, then becomes an attack not on the individual person (who is certainly beyond pain and unaware of the event) but on the entire culture of which they were part, branding it as something unworthy of notice or the most basic respect. It's an attack on the very core conceptions on which people's views of themselves and the world around them are built. No wonder, then, that desecration of corpses has been used to taunt enemies throughout history and no greater wonder at the visceral reaction such treament produces.

What that means is that such things as dragging bodies of the dead through the streets or the meant-to-be-horrifying hanging of charred corpses from a bridge are expressions of power, their intent purely psychological. They can be used by the powerful to demonstrate that power or by the powerless in an attempt to assert power (or at least to feel powerful), but the root impulse is the same.

That emotional intensification of the resistance has accompanied a similar military intensification, of which the attacks in Fallujah and Ramadi are a part. Even middle-class Sunnis who might have thought their professional or entrepreneurial skills could give them a place of influence in the "new" Iraq are becoming disillusioned and radicalized.

But on the other hand, Shiite Muslims in Iraq for the most part have avoided direct confrontations with US and other troops.

Until now, that is. Sadr's militia has initiated "the most serious insurrection of the postinvasion period," as the Times put it. The immediate spark for the violence was the closing of Sadr's newspaper and the arrest of a chief aide on a charge of being involved with the murder of another Shiite cleric last year - a charge on which Sadr was also threatened with arrest. Protests quickly built to combat in an eruption of anger months in coming and all the stronger for that reason. Fighting has gone on in a half-dozen or more places and in four towns - Kut, Kufa, Karbala, and Najaf - the al-Mahdi army seemed to be in control, from where they made demands for the Coalition forces to withdraw from populated areas and for the release of all persons recently seized.

The initial success of Sadr's forces coupled with his harsh anti-occupation message - one which often moves past that to an anti-American one (he recently called 9/11 "a miracle from God") - has generated signs of Paul Bremer's worst nightmare: a combined Sunni-Shiite resistance.

Baghdad, April 6 - On the streets of Baghdad neighborhoods long defined by differences of faith and politics, signs are emerging that resistance to the U.S. occupation may be growing from a sporadic, underground effort to a broader insurrection by militiamen who claim to be fighting in the name of their common faith, Islam.

On Monday, residents of Adhamiya, a largely Sunni section of northern Baghdad, marched with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose call for armed resistance was answered by local Sunnis the same afternoon, residents said. ...

"It's all so we will have a resistance, Adhamiya and Moqtada combined," [bakery owner Abu] Hassan said.

"What Moqtada Sadr did simply woke up the people," said Sarmad Akram, 36, who owns the small food shop next door. "Now the people have the guts to resist."

That same Washington Post article goes on to report that the reaching out from one to the other was not just a matter of bakery-shop chatter, either:

"We send you this letter from your brothers in al Anbar governate and the city of Fallujah, to say that we are with you under the banner of 'God is Greatest' and the mantle of Islam." So began a letter read over loudspeakers Monday outside Sadr's headquarters in the Shiite slum named for his late father and uncle....

"We are all behind Sayyid Moqtada Sadr, may God give him victory ... on the subject of liberation," the letter read. Several hundred members of Sadr's irregular militia ... cheered and waved pistols and swords at the words.

Portraits of al-Sadr and graffiti praising his "heroic deeds" and "valiant uprising against the occupier" have appeared in Ramadi.

This makes for an uprising significant not only in its geographical breadth but in its social depth. Sadr has exposed a deep and harsh reality that US administrators have struggled to keep under wraps: No one but no one is happy with events or how they are turning out. Even the Shiites, long an oppressed majority under Saddam Hussein and thought to be generally sympathetic to American goals (or at least what they thought were American goals) are turning against the occupation. And for the moment they and the Sunnis have decided they have a common enemy - the occupation and its representatives.

Now, Sadr is no fool. He's openly aligned himself with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, declaring his "solidarity" and saying Sistani "should know that I am his military wing in Iraq." Sistani, however, does not seem to want a military wing.

Senior scholar Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani issued a statement calling for calm to allow the problem to be resolved through negotiation.

Sistani also urged the "demonstrators not to retaliate against the occupation forces in the event of an aggression".

However, Sistani's statement declares that the "demonstrators' demands were legitimate" and "condemns acts waged by the occupation forces and pledges his support to the families of the victims".

Negotiation doesn’t seem to be in the plans of the Coalition forces, however, as US military leaders say they will "destroy the Mahdi army," pursuing a course even Shiite members of the Governing Council reject.

Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, "condemned the policy of shooting innocent demonstrators, closing papers, and arresting clerics", according to the party organ al-Adala.

Governing Councillor Abd al-Karim Al-Mohammedawi, an anti-Saddam guerrilla commander and wartime ally of the Americans in the southern province of Amara, said he might resign if the Sadrists' demands were not met, the Coalition-funded al-Sabah newspaper reported.

At the same time, however, and despite all that, the fact is this is not a general insurrection, nor do I think it will become one. While there have been clashes in several places, the numbers involved have been relatively small and, more significantly, do not seem to be swelling dramatically. 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.

It's the longer-term meaning that matters, that ripping back of the curtain that Bremer and the rest have pulled across the deep divisions and frustrations, the deep rage, the profound sense of failure and betrayal, that exists in Iraq. It's important to remember that, again, that pent-up fury has a common target: the occupiers. What happens when that's no longer true? Consider this quote:

"We lost faith in the Americans," said Asaam Al Jarah, principal of a Kadhimiya high school. "Everybody was waiting for the transition, waiting and waiting. Then we saw the law was rubbish.

"Now everything is different."

Kadhimiya is a mostly Shiite area of Baghdad across the Tigris from Adhamiya. I believe it's revealing that Shiite resentment has grown so strong in the wake of the interim constitution and Sistani's objections to it. As I've noted previously, I suspect that the Shiites viewed the overthrow of Saddam as meaning "democracy," as meaning majority rule, as meaning they would finally be in charge, and as not meaning minority rights. When things didn't go that way, they felt betrayed, that the whole thing was "rubbish" - and that maybe they'd have to think about taking care of themselves, themselves.

So long as they're thinking about that common enemy, they will not be thinking about their relative position viz-a-viz Sunnis. When that common enemy is no longer there - and "no longer there" doesn't have to mean physically, it could mean politically or psychologically, such as after the "transfer of authority" - let's call them "other considerations" will come to the fore. That's the time to fear. And whether it comes tomorrow, or July, or September, or in 2005, or whenever, it will come.

Update: Edited to insert a link