Another fine mess from Bush
Maybe it’s too bad Baghdad isn’t actually a part of the United States, like, say, New Orleans. Bush administration loyalists would be arguing that its make-believe “Green Zone” government had become the ultimate welfare state and needed to be cut loose of its dependency on U.S. dollars and military might, lest it remain permanently crippled. What’s more, they’d be right.
Instead, the al-Maliki government’s ill-advised attempt to overthrow its rivals’ control over the Iraqi port city of Basra saw American soldiers enlisted as partisan fighters in what’s essentially a domestic quarrel. Why should we care which Iranian-backed Shiite political party prevails there? With one crucial exception, the differences among the three main parties concern Iraqi civil and religious issues of no importance to Americans. How many Americans should die over whether Iraqi women are forced to wear veils?
Don’t look to our own Peerless Leader for an answer. As usual, President Bush limned the conflict in cartoonish good-guy-versus-bad-guy terms. He described the fighting in Basra and elsewhere as “a bold decision” by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and predicted “a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.”
Most Iraqis saw the Basra offensive as a clumsy power play to weaken so-called “radical anti-American cleric” Muqtada al Sadr before scheduled provincial elections. Because it followed Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent visit to Baghdad, al-Maliki’s gambit was assumed to have received his approval. That would be the same “Big Time” Cheney who recently stated that American public opinion means nothing to him, as he knows he’s right.
One can only imagine how little Iraqi public opinion means to Cheney. The seeming success of Gen. David Petraeus’s “surge” has been due to two factors: the willingness of Sunni tribes west of Baghdad to take U.S. cash and weapons in return for resisting Al Qaeda, and Muqtada al Sadr’s ceasefire in the Shiite south. His Mahdi Army’s temporary truce greatly reduced Iraqi violence.
Some observers also wondered if the secondary purpose of the attack on Basra might be to drag nearby Iran into the conflict, justifying U.S. bombing raids Cheney and his neoconservative cabal have long fantasized about. So infatuated was al-Maliki with dreams of martial glory that he personally flew to Basra to mastermind the assault, issuing demands that Sadr’s Mahdi Army disband and disarm, first in three days, then 10, then…
Alas, a funny thing happened on the way to Teheran. Even with U.S. air support and heavy weapons fire, Iraqi government forces got nowhere against the Mahdi Army. Despite five years of American training, intense street fighting left Sadr’s forces bloodied but unbowed. An Iraqi reporter for The New York Times who made his way into Basra concluded that “There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.”
Militarily, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. Iraq’s army remains essentially a mercenary outfit serving what most regard as a U.S. puppet regime. Sadr’s Mahdi Army shouldn’t be romanticized. It’s full of gangsters, thugs and religious fanatics who have indulged in brutal ethnic murders.
But they were also fighting for their very lives and families on their own sacred turf. The concept of “Iraq,” as a nation, means little or nothing to them. Clan, tribe and mosque mean everything.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].