David Judd

n March 2008, open war broke out for a time between the U.S.-backed Iraqi government and the forces of the Mehdi Army. Coinciding with the (slight) drawdown of “surged” U.S. troops in Iraq, this reminded us that the claimed successes of recent U.S. policy were, by any measure, very limited. These events also meant perfect timing for the April release of Patrick Cockburn’s new book Muqtada, a text on the commander of the Mehdi militia and leader of the Sadrist movement.

Cockburn, an award-winning journalist for the British newspaper The Independent, is one of the most knowledgeable and reliable English-language reporters on Iraq. Muqtada is Cockburn’s fourth book on Iraq, a country he has reported on for two decades; more importantly, he is one of a mere handful of Western reporters who has spent most of his time not embedded with the U.S. military, but traveling among and speaking with ordinary Iraqis.

As Cockburn notes in his introduction, coverage of Muqtada al-Sadr in the English-language media has been scanty, often inaccurate, and nearly always governed by knee-jerk, unreasoning hostility. Cockburn’s book provides a valuable corrective. However, he does not simply refute a set of myths, but also writes an absorbing narrative of the rise of a potent religious and political force, based on penetrating interviews with Iraqis inside and outside the Sadrist movement, and framed by a sharp analysis of Iraqi politics.

Nine of the book’s 17 chapters are devoted to the Sadrist movement and its precursors before the fall of Saddam Hussein; the remaining eight address Muqtada specifically. Cockburn argues that context is crucial, making it important to describe not just Muqtada himself, but the history of Shia political Islam in Iraq which set the stage for the rise of the Sadrists (as well as most of the other parties now dominating Iraqi politics).

This view seems borne out by Cockburn’s historical narrative. An understanding of the history of political Shiism in Iraq, from the rise of the Dawa party through the martyrdoms of Muqtada al-Sadr’s famous grand-uncle and father, makes it impossible to dismiss Muqtada as a mere apolitical “gangster,” grievance-fabricating “demagogue,” or irrational and erratic “firebrand cleric.” Rather, the Sadrist movement, with roots going back to the 1970s or before and a structure dating from the 1990s under Saddam, represents “a mixture of Islamic revivalism, nationalism, and populism [with] a deep appeal to angry, alienated, but terrorized young Shia men” (79). Among the Shia political parties, most of the others led by exiles who returned to Iraq with the U.S. invasion in 2003, “only [the Sadrists] represented the millions of laborers and unemployed” (115).

Despite noting their deep support and several valid reasons for it, Cockburn does not romanticize the Sadrists. He acknowledges that, though a populist in economics, Sadr is a conservative in social mores. The Sadrist militia, where able, frequently enforces the closure of shops selling alcohol, music, and videos, and the veiling of women in public — though in this category, one of Cockburn’s female interviewees tells him, the U.S.-friendly Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI or SIIC, formerly SCIRI) is worse. Cockburn also points out that despite the Sadrists’ cooperation with Sunnis in battling with the U.S. in 2004, and despite Muqtada’s verbally anti-sectarian nationalism and frequent calls for restraint, the Mehdi Army carried out the largest part of the 2006 ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in Baghdad. In fact, if anything, Cockburn goes too far in his depiction of the depth of the sectarian tendency within the Sadrist movement, dating its origin too early.

Someone who could not be dismissed as a Bush administration stenographer, Cockburn played an important role in 2005 and 2006 through his writing for The Independent by convincing many anti-war activists that talk of a developing civil war was not simply an excuse for continued occupation. He argued effectively that direct involvement of the U.S. in the vast majority of violent incidents in Iraq did not obviate the reality of sectarianism, and that the numerous social ties between Shia and Sunni could be broken. In Muqtada, Cockburn presents a nuanced picture of this development:

“Bush... speak[s] as if Sunni-Shia warfare started with the bombing of the Samarra shrine in 2006. In reality, suicide bombings clearly targeting Shia had begun at least as early as March 2004 ... Sistani counseled against retaliation ... When organized Shia retaliation did occur it came after the first Shia government was formed in May 2005, and was carried out by the Shia-dominated police and police commandos ... The relentless suicide bombings and assassinations carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq progressively infuriated the Shia community as a whole ... By February 2006 all that was needed was a particularly spectacular bombing ... to trigger massive and bloody retaliation” led by Sadrists among others (179).

However, I fear that in the process of fighting the good fight against civil war denial, Cockburn has ended up taking too extreme a position. He claims that sectarian hostility was “almost unbridgeable” (58) as long ago as 1991 after the bloody failure of a Shia uprising against Saddam in the wake of the Gulf War. This may be reading the present too far back into the past. Even in Cockburn’s description, the Shia uprising targeted not just any Sunni, but Baathist officials, who themselves included many Shia. A distinction must be made between a religiously-driven political movement — which could describe anything from al-Qaeda to the Buddhist monks leading protests against the military dictatorship in Burma — and a sectarian one. The only interviewee Cockburn quotes in support of his view that the “Sunni community,” not simply Saddam’s Baath party, felt “terror” of the 1991 uprising, is a former Baathist military officer.

In any case, Cockburn is obviously correct that a civil war is now well underway in Iraq, and less obviously but still almost surely correct in looking to the rise of a unified nationalist resistance to the U.S. occupation as the main hope for an alternative to sectarian civil war. The U.S. search for local allies could only succeed by finding and empowering Iraqis more hostile to rival sects or ethnicities than to a foreign presence. After failing to get anything useful out of secular exiles like Chalabi and Allawi, who had no constituencies in Iraq, the U.S. has turned to sectarian Shia parties like ISCI and Dawa, and more recently extended this strategy to co-opt Sunni militias willing to drop their war against the U.S. in order to strengthen their front against al-Qaeda and the Shia.

As Cockburn writes, by contrast to ISCI and its ilk, Muqtada was “the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the Sunni” on a nationalist, anti-occupation platform (204). There were signs that this might happen in 2004, during the battles of Fallujah and Najaf. However, the more nationalist Sunni insurgents did not effectively reciprocate by turning decisively against al-Qaeda.

Then, over the course of the next two years, the Mehdi Army grew massively. It had always had a loose organization, with volunteer rather than professional fighters, and rapid growth further damaged its organizational structure. By spring 2006, the mood of the impoverished and alienated young men for whom the Sadrist movement had now become the primary political representation was in favor of revenge, and however much it hurt Muqtada’s political strategy, he could do little to change this. “A man riding a tiger” (201), he could say “‘death squads that say they kill on behalf of the Mehdi Army are trying to destroy us and divide us and prevent us from raising arms against the forces of occupation,” and denounce sectarian killers as “criminals... using my name as cover for their actions” (184), but whether because of his own buried rage, for fear of isolating himself from his base, or due to simple organizational inability, he did not take more concrete action.

This is the tragedy of Iraqi politics. While — as Cockburn, despite his pessimism, appears to acknowledge — the outbreak of a civil war was not structurally inevitable, even after the U.S. invasion and Saddam’s fall, as things turned out there was no political force able and willing to bring its development to a halt.

Now, Cockburn argues, “the disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for the country to exist as anything more than a loose federation” (204). Though Muqtada has recently shown signs of gaining a better control over the Mehdi Army, successfully holding it to a ceasefire in 2007 and another in early 2008, any gesture of reconciliation he might now make will, in Cockburn’s view, be too little, too late. Though “Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent groups... turned against al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni community at the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq,” these same forces, tired of fighting a war on many fronts, have also mostly ceased fighting the occupation, and turned to the U.S. for arms and money in order to build up their strength versus the Shia.

I would like to remain more optimistic than Cockburn. After all, predicting future political developments is never certain, and we have already seen Iraqi society change very quickly — we cannot rule out the possibility of dramatic improvement. But it is difficult to find a basis from which, within the next few years, any positive turn in Iraq might develop. Full U.S. withdrawal would remove one of the driving forces of the civil war, a source of violence and of arms and money for all sides, but withdrawal would at best undo only a little of the damage that has been done to Iraq.