What does Muqtada al-Sadr Want?
Tom
Engelhardt asks hard questions at the indispensable
Tomdispatch.com about journalistic language concerning the Iraq crisis. How do
we characterize Muqtada al-Sadr? Our military operations in the country? What
words to journalists use and how does that affect perceptions?
Meanwhile,
the Associated Press expresses confusion, both
its own, and that of US government officials, about what Muqtada al-Sadr's goals
are.
I don't understand this confusion. Muqtada has given many sermons
and interviews in the past 16 months outlining his goals exactly.
1) He
wants the US troops out of the country immediately, which is to say, an end to
Occuption. If there have to be foreign troops in Iraq, he wants them under a
United Nations command.
2) He refuses to cooperate (he would say
"collaborate") with the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi, which he sees as a
puppet regime installed by the United States. He insists that no legitimate
Iraqi governmental process can begin until the US is out.
3) He wants the
reestablishment of a strong central Iraqi government with a strong military, but
which has cut all ties with the Baathist past.
4) He wants Iraq to stay
together rather than being partitioned, and has denounced Kurdish demands for
loose federalism.
5) He wants Iraqi Shiism to emerge from Iran's shadow
and to establish its independence from Iran. His movement is rooted in the
Shiite ghettos of Iraq and is very indigenous. He is not Iran's catspaw in Iraq,
quite the opposite. He is strong Iraqi nationalist.
6) He sometimes talks
about "democracy" in post-American Iraq, but probably just means populism. Like
Peron and Franco, his populism implies his ability to maintain and direct his
own militia, who provide "order" (read puritanical morality imposed by force) to
Shiite neighborhoods.
7) In the long term, he would like to see a system
in Iraq similar to the regime in Iran. He wants Islamic law to be the law of the
land, and he wants clerics to rule. His father studied with Ayatollah Khomeini
and accepted the notion of clerical rule. So does Muqtada. That is, there may be
a place for elections (as in Iran), but true power would rest in the hands of
the clerics. He has admitted all this in Arabic press interviews.
So, I
don't understand the widespread puzzlement reported by AP. It may not be a
simple set of positions, but they aren't hidden from view or hard to
understand.
There were several loud explosions Thursday
morning near the Shrine of Ali where Muqtada is holed up with about 1000 men.
Although Muqtada agreed Wednesday to disarm
his militia and leave the shrine if US troops would withdraw from the city
first, few expect this siege to end well or easily. The wire services do not
appear to have caught on that Muqtada is demanding the withdrawal of US troops
as a necessary precondition, but that is what is being reported by
al-Jazeerah.
Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan threatened to teach
Muqtada a lesson he would never forget, and promised decisive action against
him, if he did not leave the shrine within hours. (-al-Zaman ). (Shaalan
has adopted the body language and rhetoric of the old Baath regime, which makes
the skin of a lot of Iraqis crawl. To be fair, Muqtada also acts in a thuggish
way that alarms many Iraqis who have had enough of thugs.)