The Kabuki in the Iraq Plan

When the escalation plan was announced on Wednesday Juan Cole had this to say about one specific part of the plan: the notion that Irqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would allow US troops to go after the Madhi Army militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr.

If part of the strategy is to assault the Mahdi Army frontally, that will cause enormous trouble in the Shiite south. I would suggest that PM Nuri al-Maliki's warning to the Mahdi Militia to disarm or face the US military is in fact code. He is telling the Sadrists to lie low while the US mops up the Sunni Arab guerrillas. Sadr's militia became relatively quiescent for a whole year after the Marines defeated it at Najaf in August, 2004. But since it is rooted in an enormous social movement, the militia is fairly easy to reconstitute after it goes into hiding.

I'm not surprised that Cole is, at least for the moment, correct, as the Sadr militia does appear to be keeping a lower profile as American reinforcements enter Baghdad.

Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements.

"We have explicit directions to keep a low profile . . . not to confront, not to be dragged into a fight and to calm things down," said one official who received the orders from the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr [...]

Militia members say al-Sadr ordered them to stand down shortly after President George Bush's announcement that the U.S. would send 17,500 more American troops to Baghdad to work alongside the Iraqi security forces.

The decision by al-Sadr to lower his force's profile in Baghdad will likely cut violence in the city and allow American forces to show quick results from their beefed up presence. But it is also unlikely in the long term to change the balance of power here. Mahdi Army militiamen say that while they remain undercover now, they are simply waiting for the security plan to end.

So, you have to wonder where this would all lead. The new US troops surge into Baghdad, and the Shiite militia groups have melted away. The troops need to justify their existence and go after any source of violence in the capital, so they start hitting Sunni insurgent groups. Maybe in the bargain, they pick off a few Sunnis who hold weapons to protect their families.

Some Sunnis worry that the new Baghdad security plan will clear the way for the Mahdi Army to finally cleanse Sunnis from Baghdad. In announcing the plan, President Bush said that U.S. forces would concentrate on defeating al-Qaida and the insurgency.

But Sunnis note that in most Sunni neighborhoods, local men unaffiliated with the insurgency also carry weapons to protect their families from militias and the Iraqi security forces, who they distrust and believe are heavily infiltrated by the Mahdi Army [...]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose political backers include al-Sadr, has told legislators and advisors that security forces under the new plan will first go after the Sunni insurgency, which is responsible for most of the capital's car and roadside bombs that target Shiites and U.S. forces.

After that, he's said he'll move to quell militias, including the Mahdi Army, who are suspected in the killings of dozens of Sunnis.

So after Sunnis are cleansed from Baghdad, and the vast majority of the police is Shiite, and the vast majority of the Army is Shiite... you have to wonder exactly what the effect of the US surge would be. Is it to put their thumb on the scale in the civil war? Is it to push the 80% solution? Many seem to think so.

"The new security plan was crafted to get rid of the Sunnis and the resistance in Baghdad," said Sinan Abdullah, 30, a Sunni plastics trader in Zaiyouna. "Instead of dissolving the militias, the government starts with the Sunnis first. I have one sentence for Bush, 'You have dealt with the wrong people.'"

Fareed Zakaria seems to think so:

American forces have won every battle they have fought in Iraq. Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea—better four years late than never. But the crucial question is, will military progress lead to political progress? That logic, at the heart of the president's new strategy, strikes me as highly dubious.

Administration officials have pointed to last week's fighting against Sunni insurgents in and around Baghdad's Haifa Street as a textbook example of the new strategy. Iraqi forces took the lead, American troops backed them up and the government did not put up any obstacles. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger concluded that the battle "looked like a successful test of unified [American-Iraqi] effort."

But did it? NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings, embedded with an American advisory team that took part in the fighting, reports that no more than 24 hours after the battle began on Jan. 6, the brigade's Sunni commander, Gen. Razzak Hamza, was relieved of his command. The phone call to fire him came directly from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite. Lt. Col. Steven Duke, commander of a U.S. advisory team working with the Iraqis, and a 20-year Army veteran, describes Hamza as "a true patriot [who] would go after the bad guys on either side." Hamza was replaced by a Shiite.

Joint operations against Shiite militias are far less likely, and not only because of political interference from the top. Groups like Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army don't generally start fire fights with the Americans or attack Iraqi forces. Their goals are different, quieter. Another U.S. adviser, Maj. Mark Brady, confirms reports that the Mahdi Army has been continuing to systematically take over Sunni neighborhoods, killing, terrorizing and forcing people out of their homes. "They're slowly moving across the river," he told Hastings, from predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad into the predominantly Sunni west. If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there's a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder. Colonel Duke puts it bluntly: "[The Mahdi Army] is sitting on the 50-yard line eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them."

With yet another botched hanging inflaming sectarian tensions, with Iraq's National Security Adviser saying that the Mahdi Army will not be dismantled, you begin to see a pattern here. The Iraqi government may be using this surge strategy as a means to fight their civil war with American strength. Maliki wants the American troops to focus on the Sunni insurgency, period. By the way, the Shiites we would be emboldening in this fight would then be the same Shiites who are closely aligned with Iran, who we claim are helping both sides in Iraq to enable some sort of "managed chaos" (which is ridiculous and dubiously sourced).

So there's going to continue to be a lot of Kabuki theater in the next few months. If the Mahdi Army blends into the population violence could die down. It may die down anyway, because historically January-March is a down time for violence anyway. So war supporters will claim that their strategy is winning the war. Meanwhile they'll be killing Sunnis, and pretty much only Sunnis, creating the very Shiite crescent they claim to be so afraid of. They of course won't be able to kill all the Sunnis, so this will create more angry Sunnis right behind them. Which means that we would only be moving the country FURTHER AWAY from a political solution in the name of restoring order. And we'd be doing Iran's bidding for them.