Tales Of The Obtuse

The Weekly Standard's John Noonan might want to think about thinking out loud less:

[W]ould Obama have doubled-down in Afghanistan if Petraeus' Iraq pacification hadn't succeeded beyond expectation? Where would our Afghanistan strategy be if General Petraeus hadn't provided a perfect case-study for effective prosecution of a tough counter-insurgency?

Could Iraq have saved Afghanistan?

Yes, wouldn't be ironic if the triage strategy that was employed to contain the catastrophe created by the Iraq invasion was also employed in Afghanistan to contain the catastrophe created by the Iraq invasion?

The more appropriate question, at least for those interested in avoiding situations where massively costly counterinsurgency efforts are required to salvage incompetently managed wars, is: Where would our Afghanistan strategy be if we hadn't diverted U.S. attention, expertise, and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in the first place? Would we even have to have one? Would we currently be preparing to triple the number of U.S. troops there in the space of a year?

Cultivating His Only Constituency

Following on last Saturday's "Put me in, Coach!" op-ed from Ayad Allawi, Iraq Slogger reports today that Allawi has retained Haley Barbour's lobbying firm in his bid to be installed as the Iraqi Pinochet. (As if Maliki hadn't gotten the message yet, yesterday Bush called him a "good man," putting Maliki in the august company of such political success stories as Bernie Kerik and Michael Brown.)

Juan Cole relays rumours of a coming coup, and a two-year security plan involving the installation of a "military commission," presumably to keep the lid on Iraq while Bush sallies forth into Iran, and even greater disaster.

People, It's Bad

Shorter cross-section of national security experts (as well as Daniel Pipes, who was disappointed that the poll contained no question like: How seditious are American Muslims? A) Very seditious; B) Extremely seditious indeed; C) Michelle Malkin is a half-stepper) polled for the Center for American Progress's latest Terrorism Index:

"Sh*t's all f'ed up!"

More later.

Guilt by Assertion

Reporting from Iraq, Michael Totten writes about how Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi have infiltrated the Iraqi security services. Totten makes some interesting observations, talks to some Iraqis, but then gives us this:

The Mahdi Army is Iran’s major proxy in Iraq. It is, in effect, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah.

The Iranians know what they’re doing. Lebanon was their proving ground. The Revolutionary Guards built Hezbollah from scratch along the border with Israel and in the suburbs south of Beirut during the chaos of civil war and Israeli occupation. In Iraq they’re simply repeating the formula, only this time more violently.

I've seen it repeatedly asserted that Sadr is an Iranian tool, usually by right-of-center types who are trying to gin up a war with Iran, but have never seen any evidence for it, and Totten offers none. Most of the reporting I've seen from Iraq doesn't support that contention, and my own research on Sadr and his movement strongly argues against Sadr's being an Iranian agent.

The problem here is that Totten throws his assertion into the middle of some actual reportage, and then Powerline parrots it, and on up the food chain until it's simply an article of faith among conservatives, just like the Saddam-al Qaeda connection and the WMDs to Syria nonsense, to be folded into the larger argument for war with whomever, all the time. (In one of those delightful examples of unintentional irony that continually crop up like leafy spurge amid the defiant know-nothingism of rightwing blogdom, a later Powerline post is entitled "Never let the facts stand in the way of a meme." Heh, indeed.)

I don't think it's correct that the Pasdaran (Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) built Hezbollah from scratch. The Pasdaran trained and indoctrinated several breakaway extremist Lebanese Shia factions which became Hizb 'Allah ("Party of God.") The claim is even less true of the Mahdi Army, which developed, like Muqtada's entire movement, out of the clerical activism of Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr. A central element of the elder Sadr's program, and now Muqtada's, is opposition to Iranian influence. While his pro-Arab nativist rhetoric has alienated Muqtada from a significant portion of Iraq's Shia clerical hierarchy, many of whom, including Grand Ayatollah Sistani, are of Persian origin, it has endeared him to Iraq's Arab Shia underclass, which is where he finds his greatest support.

If any group can be said to have been created by the Pasdaran "from scratch," it is the Badr Brigade, the militia wing of SIIC (formerly SCIRI), formed out of Iraqi exiles and defectors, and POWs from the Iran-Iraq War. It is the Badr Brigade that continues to serve as "Iran's major proxy" in Iraq, constantly battling the Mahdi Army for control of Shia neighborhoods in southern Iraq. However, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of SIIC (and former commander of the Badr), is now George W. Bush's friend , so it won't do to point this out.

This isn't to say that Sadr receives no Iranian support, he certainly does, as do various groups in Iraq, directly and through proxies. After their offers to help stabilize Iraq were rebuffed by the Bush administration, elements in the Iranian government clearly foresaw the coming chaos, and starting hedging their bets, getting their fingers into different pies, betting on various horses to win, and mixing every possible metaphor, as a way to produce the best possible outcome for Iran. It is true that Sadr admires and emulates Hezbollah. Like them, he has fashioned a political identity that combines sometimes contradictory elements of populism, nationalism, pro-Arabism, and pan-Shiism. The tendency of some to elide these elements in favor of a "Iranian tool" narrative indicates a failure to appreciate some of the complexities of Iraqi-Shia identity, and, of course, an attempt to gin up a war with Iran.

There is one thing Sadr and Iran undoubtedly do share, however. The U.S. has effectively done for Sadr in Iraq what we've done for Iran in the wider Gulf region: Pursued a series of policies which seem to have been designed in a lab to facilitate his becoming the dominant actor.

Update: Eric Martin has some other observations.

Misunderstanding Muqtada

I have a new piece on Muqtada al-Sadr over at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Helping the Enemy

Reading about President Bush's latest attempt to defend the Iraq war by presenting al-Qaeda as SPECTRE reminded me to link to this Abu Aardvark post from a couple weeks ago. In discussing the various groups fighting the US in Iraq, and criticizing the way that Bush and his flacks try to conflate them all into al-Qaeda ( i.e. "The folks who attacked us on September 11"), Marc Lynch made this point:

The real harm comes in the wider Arab and Muslim world, where the exaggeration of al-Qaeda's role works directly and devastatingly against American goals. It magnifies al-Qaeda's perceived power, strengthening its own media campaign and feeding its most powerful propaganda instrument. Attributing all these attacks to al-Qaeda certainly doesn't hurt al-Qaeda's image: Iraq is the one place where al-Qaeda's violence is actually widely supported in the Muslim world (a recent PIPA survey found that over 90% of Egyptians thought that attacks on American civilians were against Islam and illegitimate, but over 90% of Egyptians thought that attacks on American troops in Iraq were legitimate). The administration in effect claims more power and military success for al-Qaeda in Iraq than al-Qaeda claims for itself - for which the al-Qaeda leadership can only be bemusedly grateful. Forget al-Hurra - if you're looking for a real public diplomacy fiasco, you'll be hard pressed to do worse than the US acting as al-Qaeda's agent in promoting its Iraqi success.

We constantly hear conservatives condemning talk of withdrawal as "helping the enemy." We don't want to withdraw from Iraq and "hand bin Laden a propaganda victory," or some such. Leaving aside that it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, whenever that may occur, is not spun as a victory by Islamic extremists, as Lynch makes clear, the propaganda victory that Bush is handing al-Qaeda is not a matter of prediction. It is happening. By continuing to cling to and defend a failed policy by inflating al-Qaeda's power in Iraq, by treating al-Qaeda as a top-down organization with command and control capability, rather than a loosely affiliated ideological network, Bush is effectively waving al-Qaeda's flag for them. He got us into Iraq by misrepresenting Saddam Hussein's capabilities, and he's keeping us there by doing the same with al-Qaeda. We know the tragic consequences of the former; we haven't begun to grasp the consequences of the latter.

This Has Been Tried Before

Charles Krauthammer:

Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation.

Blackadder Goes Forth :

Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.

Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?

Blackadder: That's right, there was one tiny flaw in the plan.

George: Oh, what was that?

Blackadder: It was bollocks.

Heads, He Wins; Tails, We Lose

While reinforcing my point from last week about Muqtada al-Sadr's significance in Iraqi politics, the deep roots of his movement, and the utter folly of attempting to stand up a government which doesn't accomodate it, this article in today's NY Times also sheds some light on Muqtada's "insider/outsider" strategy:

After months of lying low, the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd strategy that reaches out to Iraqis on the street while distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular government.

Mr. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from government, contributing to the political paralysis noted in a White House report last week. That outsider status has enhanced Mr. Sadr’s appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less relevant to their daily lives.

Mr. Sadr has been working tirelessly to build support at the grass-roots level, opening storefront offices across Baghdad and southern Iraq that dispense services that are not being provided by the government. In this he seems to be following the model established by Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite group, as well as Hamas in Gaza, with entwined social and military wings that serve as a parallel government.
...

The Sadrists exhibit a quiet confidence, and are pulling ever more supporters into their ranks. “The Sadr movement cannot be marginalized; it is the popular base,” said Sheik Salah al-Obaidi, the chief spokesman and a senior strategist for Mr. Sadr’s movement in Najaf. “We will not be affected by efforts to push us to one side because we are the people. We feel the people’s day-to-day sufferings.”

A number of working-class Shiites reflected that sentiment in conversations about the Mahdi militia and Mr. Sadr. Their relatives and neighbors work both for the Sadr offices and for the militia, blurring the line between social programs and paramilitary activity.

Mr. Sadr’s offices are accessible storefronts that dispense a little bit of everything: food, money, clothes, medicine and information. From just one office in Baghdad and one in Najaf in 2003, the Sadr operation has ballooned. It now has full-service offices in most provinces and nine in Baghdad, as well as several additional storefront centers. In some neighborhoods, the militiamen come around once a month to charge a nominal fee — about 5,000 Iraqi dinars, or $4 — for protection. In others, they control the fuel supply, and in some, where sectarian killings have gone on, they control the real estate market for empty houses.

Sadr essentially has the best of both worlds here. His staunch and consistent opposition to the U.S. presence and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, and the confrontational stance which the U.S. continues to take toward him, allows him to credibly criticize the failure of the government to deliver services and security. At the same time, his loyalists' control of the Health and Transportation ministries provides access to government funds and resources, which can then be distributed as patronage and charity under the banner of his movement. Clever.

Misunderestimated, Again

Others have ably dismantled Kimberly Kagan's unconvincing defense of the Kagan Family Surgeshow, but I found this bit particularly amazing:

The larger aim of the new strategy is creating an opportunity for Iraq's leaders to negotiate a political settlement. These negotiations are underway. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to form a political coalition with Amar al-Hakim and Kurdish political leaders, but excluding Moqtada al-Sadr, and has invited Sunnis to participate. He has confronted Moqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has apparently prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January.

“So-called Iraqi nationalist”? Sadr is unique among Shi'i leaders in that his nationalist credentials are not in any serious dispute. His representatives relentlessly hammer at the fact that while many other Shi'i leaders, most notably the Hakims, chose the safety of exile, the Sadrs stayed in Iraq, and were executed for their activism. This is one of the main sources of Muqtada's political strength: He stayed and suffered with his fellow Iraqis. SCIRI was renamed SIIC and realigned away from Khameini and toward Sistani for exactly this reason, to make up for its nationalist deficit vis a vis Sadr, and combat the perception that it is an Iranian instrument.

I don't know how I can say this any more clearly: There will be no settlement in Iraq without Sadr. It's almost comical how many times Muqtada has gone to ground, and the usual suspects have declared him politically dead, over, dealt with. After four years of trying to marginalize Sadr, crowing every time he suffers a perceived setback, and running home for dinner every time he returns, stronger, more defiant, with bigger crowds, and even more juice than before, we must understand that A) Muqtada al-Sadr represents a genuine and extremely formidable Iraqi constitutency, one with organizational roots that go back decades, B) The survival of the Iraqi government, and probably of the Iraqi state, depends to a great extent on the government’s accommodation of that movement, and C) After four long years, the people defending Bush's Iraq policy apparently still don’t know very much about Iraq.

The Wages of Flypaper Strategy

Quote of the day from Mohammad Bashar al Faidi, via Conflict Blotter:

"The Arabs went to Afganistan and got a masters in violent Jihad, but in Iraq they’re all getting PhDs."

A Man We Must Do Business With

I recommend Bartle Breese Bull’s op-ed from last Sunday, in which he discusses the ways in which Muqtada al-Sadr has actually been contributing to Iraqi stability, while also maintaining his steadfast opposition to the U.S. presence.

The Sadrist movement has always been about Iraq for the Iraqis. They might accept help from Iran — and I saw Iranian supplies in their compounds in Najaf in 2004 — but the movement is not for sale. Mr. Sadr gets his strength from the street. And the Arabs of the Iraqi street have no time for Persian bosses.

Nor do they seem to want to foment an all-out civil war. For all the time I have spent with Sadrist death-squad leaders who focus on killing former Baathists and Al Qaeda’s supporters (Sunnis all), I have spent just as much time with Mahdi men who have been sent by their leaders to protect Sunni mosques after Sunni provocations, lest Shiites retaliate too broadly.

It was no coincidence that in February, a few weeks after the Baghdad security plan started, a Sunni mosque was reopened in Sadr City. Nor is it a coincidence that the current plan, while it has largely failed to stop car bombs, which are primarily a Sunni phenomenon, has for the moment more or less ended the type of violence in which the Mahdi Army participated most: roving death squads.

Why would Mr. Sadr cooperate with the Americans and Mr. Maliki’s government? While he runs the biggest popular movement in the country, his followers are far from a majority. He is doing exactly what any other rational actor would do: He keeps up the angry rhetoric, and he plays ball with the democratic project.
...

The real story about Moktada al-Sadr is not his exciting sermons but his broad underwriting, both passive and active, of the official project in Iraq. Since he stood down his forces in August 2004, he has provided the same narrative time and again. It is what we should expect from the canniest politician in Iraq: the rhetoric of the dispossessed, and the actions of an heir to power.

Sadr's fierce Iraqi nationalism is always what made accusations of fealty to Iran transparently ridiculous.

This is also worth noting:

It is no accident that he preaches from the Kufa mosque rather than the more prestigious one at Najaf. As the site of the tomb of Imam Ali, the great martyr of Shiism, Najaf is the center of the Shiite clerical hierarchy, a Vatican of sorts for the faith. It is a rich city.

But Moktada al-Sadr leads a movement of the poor, inherited from his father, who inherited it from an uncle. His singsong exhortation in Kufa last week was a direct reference to the most famous cry from his father’s epic, and ultimately suicidal, sermons under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s: “Yes, yes, to electricity. Yes, yes, to water.” Young Mr. Sadr speaks not for the elites but for the biggest and most deprived group of people in Iraq: the Shiite lower orders.

Kufa also has special significance Shi'i history. Kufa is where Imam Hussein, grandson of Muhammad, was travelling when his party was intercepted near Karbala by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Hussein had been traveling to Kufa at the request of the town's inhabitants, intending to lead a revolt against what they saw as the illegitimate Umayyad Caliphate. Yazid found out about this, sent his forces to crush the revolt in Kufa, and then to lay in wait for Hussein. Nearly all of Hussein's group were martyred, and Hussein's head was brought to Yazid as a trophy in Damascus. When Shi'is mourn the death of Imam Hussein during the Muharram observances, one of the rituals and themes is the lamentation and acceptance of the guilt of the Kufans for not coming to Hussein's aid in his hour of need.

Being based in Kufa, in addition to representing those who bore the brunt of Ba'athist tyranny, poor Shi'is, Muqtada is also able to place himself squarely within the Shi'i martyrdom narrative, and present himself and his movement as instruments of long-awaited Shi'i redemption and justice.

Missed Him By That Much

Patrick Cockburn, on the recently revealed U.S. attempt to assassinate Muqtada al-Sadr:

[Mowaffak al-]Rubai'e had gone to Najaf in August 2004 to try to mediate an end to the fighting. He met Mr Sadr who agreed to a set of conditions to end the crisis. "He actually signed the agreement with his own handwriting," said Dr Rubai'e. "He wanted the inner Najaf, the old city, around the shrine to be treated like the Vatican."

Having returned to Baghdad to show the draft document to Iyad Allawi, who was prime minister at the time, Dr Rubai'e went back to Najaf to make a final agreement with Mr Sadr.

It was agreed that the last meeting would take place in the house in Najaf of Muqtada's father Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr who had been murdered by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons five years before. Dr Rubai'e and other mediators started for the house. As they did so they saw the US Marines open up an intense bombardment of the house and US Special Forces also heading for it. But the attack was a few minutes premature. Mr Sadr was not yet in the house and managed to escape.

Although Dr Rubai'e, as Iraqi National Security Adviser since 2004 and earlier a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, is closely associated with the American authorities in Baghdad, he has no doubt about what happened.

He sees the negotiations as part of a charade to lure Mr Sadr, who is normally very careful about his own security, to a house where he could be eliminated.

The cloddishness on display here, the utter ignorance of history and symbolism, is no less staggering for being unsurprising. Attempting to kill Muqtada as he entered the house of his revered, martyred father Grand Ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr(assassinated by Saddam in 1999), under a flag of truce, in Shi'ism's holiest city...Like so much else having to do with this war, it seems like it could have been designed in a lab to produce precisely the opposite of the the desired result: Increased distrust of the U.S. Coalition by majority Shi'is, massively enhanced street cred for Muqtada.

Even if the assassination attempt had succeeded, I doubt it would have made things better, and could very likely have made things worse. The success of Muqtada has less to do with his own political acumen, though it's become increasingly apparent that that is a factor, more with the deep resonance among poor Shi'is of his father's populist-nationalist program, which even before 2004 was supported by a large network of clerical activists. At least, in Muqtada, you have a figure who can draw together a substantial majority of the groups identifying as "Sadrist," rather than it devolving into a contest between Sadrist leaders to see who's more hardcore.

Also, the Israelis have been killing "key" Palestinian leaders for decades; if you want to know how well that's worked out, note that they've been doing it for decades.

New Name, New Attitude

In what I think is a very significant move, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has changed its name to the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council , and has indicated that it will now look to Ayatollah Sistani, rather than Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, as a main source of guidance. As Juan Cole notes, just as important as the move away from Iran is the move away from Khomeinism, the rule by the jurist, in which a supreme jurisprudent can effectively overrule any government decision which he holds is not appropriately Islamic. Sistani has declared his support for a more limited, though of course still significant, role for clerics in an Iraqi Islamic republic.

President Bush received SCIRI’s leader, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, in the White House a few months ago. It seemed odd to me that Bush was cuddling up with Hakim while continuing to try, and failing, to marginalize Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim’s main rival. I think it’s been apparent for a while now that Sadr is the key figure in the new Iraq, representing both Shi’i ascendancy, with a social activist program modeled on Hezbollah’s, and strong Arab-Iraqi nationalism, which always made charges of his being a pawn of Iran hard to believe. Muqtada has stridently opposed the U.S. presence in Iraq since the beginning, which, in the harsh light of Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and Haditha, make him look prophetic to many Iraqis, even those who don’t particularly sympathize with his harshly conservative agenda.

The struggle for political power among Shi’i parties has, to a great extent, been a struggle between Shi’i scholarly families, most notably the Sadrs and Hakims. While Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim represents a clerical line as prominent and revered as the Sadrs, Muqtada has nationalist credentials that Hakim can’t touch. Muqtada’s uncle, Grand Ayatollah Baqr al-Sadr, is considered by many to be the most significant Shi’i scholar of the 20th century, and many Iraqi Shi’is had hoped that he would lead their own revolution after the success of Khomeini in Iran. Fearing this exact thing, Saddam did the unthinkable: He had Sadr executed in 1980, the first execution of a Grand Ayatollah in modern history.

Muqtada's father, Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated by Saddam in 1999 along with two of Muqtada’s brothers, while not regarded as an intellectual equal of his cousin, nevertheless actualized Baqr’s theories about clerical activism, building a ministry and broad base of support among Iraq’s poor Shi’is. It was Sadeq after whom Baghdad’s Shi’i slum neighborhood Saddam City (originally built by Qassem as “Revolution City”) was renamed “Sadr City” after the fall of Saddam’s government and the neighborhood’s immediate takeover by activists and militants loyal to Sadeq al-Sadr, now represented by his son, Muqtada.

In the wake of Baqr al-Sadr’s death in 1980, scores of Iraqi Shi’i clerics, the Hakims among them, sought refuge in Iran. It was there that the Hakims helped to found SCIRI, with Iran’s support. Around the time of the U.S. invasion, Abd al-Aziz reentered Iraq as commander of the Badr Brigade, the militia wing of SCIRI, armed and trained by the Iranian Republican Guard. He took over as leader of SCIRI after his elder brother, Grand Ayatollah Baqr al Hakim, was murdered by a truck bomb in Najaf in 2003

Though both families suffered greatly from Saddam’s tyranny, the fact that the Sadrs stayed and struggled, while the Hakims fled, has been relentlessly hammered at by Muqtada’s adherents. That the Sadrists have been able to compete so well against the far better organized and funded SCIRI indicates just how effective this line of argument has been among Iraqis, and SCIRI's new name and redirection away from Iran and Khamenei indicate that they are trying to fix this.

Feith on Tenet

In a questionable example of editorial stunt-casting, the apparently still utterly and defiantly clueless Douglas Feith produces this jaw-dropper in his review of George Tenet's new ass-covering memoir:

Anyone can make an honest mistake. But the problem with George Tenet is that he doesn't seem to care to get his facts straight. He is not meticulous. He is willing to make up stories that suit his purposes and to suppress information that does not.

Oh my.

We are also informed that Feith's own ACM will be forthcoming. This presents a problem, as who will be found to review it who has even less credibility than Douglas Feith?

Return of the Son of Stabbed in the Back

We knew it was coming. From today's Wall Street Journal editorial:

Gen. David Petraeus is in Washington this week, where on Monday he briefed President Bush on the progress of the new military strategy in Iraq. Today he will give similar briefings on Capitol Hill, but maybe he should save his breath. As fellow four-star Harry Reid recently informed America, the war Gen. Petraeus is fighting and trying to win is already "lost."

Mr. Reid has since tried to "clarify" that remark, and in a speech Monday he laid out his own strategy for Iraq. But perhaps we ought to be grateful for his earlier candor in laying out the strategic judgment--and nakedly political rationale--that underlies the latest Congressional bid to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq starting this fall. By doing so, he and the Democrats are taking ownership of whatever ugly outcome follows a U.S. defeat in Iraq.

We can now expect variations on this to be repeated ad nauseum on cable news, with the O'ReillyBeckHannityKristols insisting that those traitorous Democrats "never gave the surge a chance," and, decades from now, AEI and Heritage fellows churning out pseudo-histories of the Iraq war in which victory was within our grasp up until the moment the spineless Democrats retook Congress.

To state the obvious, the idea that the the failure of George W. Bush's Iraq policy can be laid at the feet of the Democratic Party would have to be substantially more plausible to even be considered preposterous. Many liberals and Democrats do share in the blame for getting us into this war, but for four years it was waged, and countless irreparable blunders made, with the acquiescence of a rubber-stamp Republican Congress. Non-conservatives with expertise in the region were studiously ignored by the administration. Trying to blame the Democrats for the suck we're in now is more than just wrong, more than just mendacious, it's genuinely insane.

Turning the Corner. Again.

I guess it's Fred Kagan's bad luck to have his optimistic "The surge looks like it could be working if you spin around several times, do twenty push-ups, then squint real hard, tilt your head just right, and peek through your fingers!" op-ed published the day after one of the most violent since the start of the Iraq war. But, then, I guess it's all of our bad luck that the President chose to listen to one of the small handfull of scholars in this country who still think that the President's original aims for the war are remotely achievable, rather than the overwhelming majority of Americans who think that it's long past time for a drastic change in policy. A couple comments.

This burgeoning sense of Iraqness can be seen beyond central government. Pictures of the recent Sadrist demonstration in Najaf showed many people carrying Iraqi flags and few carrying pictures of Sadr. The movement's strategists clearly felt a need to show they are Iraqis rather than followers of a particular leader.

The Sadr movement has always been the most stridently nationalistic of Shi'i tendencies in Iraq, and the presence of Iraqi flags at their demonstrations is nothing new. It would be reasonable to expect one of the primary architects of the Surge Strategy to know this.

Americans have been subjected to too much hyperbole about this war from the outset. Excessively rosy scenarios have destroyed the credibility of the administration. The exaggerated certainty of leading war opponents that the conflict is already lost is every bit as misplaced. Too much optimism and pessimism has prevented Americans from accurately evaluating a complex, fluid situation.

Sorry, there is simply no equivalence to be had between the war's advocates and its critics here. At every step, Bush and his water carriers have chosen to believe the rosiest scenarios, and constantly denigrated their fellow Americans who pointed out that those scenarios were completely at odds with observable reality.

Leaving aside that having Kagan review the success of a plan devised by himself, and upon which his credibility rests, (not that he'll lose a dollar of income if it continues to nosedive) is a bit like having Kenny G take to the pages of Downbeat to tout the improvisational fireworks contained within his new album of Hootie and the Blowfish covers, this corner that Kagan claims we may be turning would be about the fiftieth or so corner we've turned, and that's twelve laps, and I'm very tired.

Flypaper Update

This 60 Minutes segment on Hassan Butt, a former militant jihadi fund raiser who now speaks out against violent Islamism, is well worth the time. Butt gives a fascinating account of how young British Muslims like himself are being recruited into the network, how the network raises funds, and how he now feels that Islam is being misused.

I think it's obviously in our interest to support those who challenge the Koranic justification of terrorism. There's a lot in the segment to discuss, but I found the following very interesting in regard to the question of whether U.S. involvement in Iraq is helping their work, aiding the promotion of democracy, or bolstering our security in any way. It's not encouraging:

The London bombings changed him. He began asking questions of his handlers, theological questions. He wanted to know whether the bombings could ever be justified in Islam. He waited and waited for answers. Months later, he was summoned by his handlers to a meeting in the Middle East. But he wasn’t given answers, only new orders.

"They were trying to force me into Iraq to fight basically," Butt says.

"So, to summarize, you're asking, basically, why should we be killing innocent people?" Simon asks.

"That's correct," Butt replies.

"And the answer you eventually received is go to Iraq and perhaps carry out a suicide mission?" Simon asks.

"Go to Iraq to basically – the actual word that they used was that I needed 'reprogramming.' And Iraq would give me the opportunity to basically be reprogrammed for what I needed I mean. I was quite shocked at the analogy," Butt says. "To think that will, firstly, I'm neither a computer nor a robot. And I don't know on your say so, I do on God's say so. And if you can't justify to me or prove to me that this is what God wants, then I'm gonna have to go my separate ways."

Despite Bob Simon's suggestion, I find it unlikely that al Qaeda would send one of their top fundraisers, a person in whom they'd already invested considerable training and resources, to Iraq just to kill himself, though I suppose that is possible. More likely, they wanted him to go to Iraq to experience their jihad up close, to get his head straight and recommit himself to the struggle, and his particular role in it, as a result of linking up and forming relationships with comrades in arms. In other words, Iraq has become like a Boy Scout Jamboree, except instead of vague Christianity and Pinewood Derby, it's militant Islamism and IEDs. Come to Iraq, get fired up, go back home to carry on the fight.

To point out the staggeringly obvious, this represents (yet)a(nother) significant failure in the Iraq strategy. Flypaper Theory held that the war in Iraq would serve as a shiny object to distract terrorists intending to attack inside America: They would go to Iraq, and they would never leave. Instead, Iraq has become a terrorist training camp and proving ground, an anvil upon which new militant jihadis are being forged every day. The reverberations of this, as with the similarly galvanizing events which took place in Afghanistan in the 1980s, will be felt for decades, as these highly motivated and trained activists return to their home countries, in the Middle East and beyond.

Sadr and Iran

Babak Rahimi on new developments in Muqtada's relationship with Iran.

Also, be sure to read Spencer Ackerman's dispatches from Iraq.

WHERE'S MUQTADA?

Juan Cole is skeptical of reports that he's fled to Iran. Mark Steyn and Michael Ledeen are certain that Muqtada's in Iran, and claim this as proof that the surge is working.

Oh man, that's a tough one. Who to believe? On one hand, you've got a guy who's been pretty much right about everything having to do with Iraq and Iran over the last four years. On the other, you have Mark Steyn and Michael "Islam is very unpopular in Iran nowadays" Ledeen, whose incredible ability to be wrong about every. last. thing. relating to Iraq and Iran has been matched only by their ability to soldier on without ever seeming to notice.

As Cole notes, it's in Muqtada's political rivals' interest to promote the idea that he has fled to Iran, as Muqtada has frequently condemned leaders who chose exile during the Saddam era, rather than stay in Iraq to struggle and risk death as the Sadrs did. This has proven to be a very effective rhetorical weapon for Muqtada against better-funded rivals like the Hakims.

Labeling Sadr "a Persian stooge" and "an Iranian agent," Steyn and Ledeen seem unable to grasp the reality that Muqtada represents a genuine political movement in Iraq, one rooted in a tradition of clerical activism going back decades. They hide information like this in places called books.