Lebanese Hizbullah in Iraq

So much New York Times today, so little time to read and digest it… But as I noted here yesterday, the situation for the whole Bushite scheme in Iraq is this week reaching a clear turning point.
Interesting times…
So my final “selection” from today’s NYT is this piece by Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins, under the title Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq.
And yes, as the article makes clear, that is Lebanese Hizbullah that they are writing about.
Here’s the lead:

A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.
The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said.

My guess is that the anonymous US official in question is CIA Director Michael Hayden, who in standard journalistic practice is referred to by name elsewhere in the article.
The Mahdi Army is, of course, the main Sadrist paramilitary formation.
Gordon and Filkins write, intriguingly, that the anonymous official’s account,

is consistent with a claim made in Iraq this summer by a mid-level Mahdi commander, who said his militia had sent 300 fighters to Lebanon, ostensibly to fight alongside Hezbollah. “They are the best-trained fighters in the Mahdi Army,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Well, “consistent”, give a or take a difference of some 200% or 500% in the number of Mahdi Army said to have gone to Lebanon to train with Hizbullah… There is, after all, quite a difference between “300” and “1,000 to 2,000”.
However, the report from the mid-level Mahdi commander has some real credibility, since we learn at the end of the article that a Baghdad-based, Iraqi NYT reporter called Hosham Hussein also “contributed reporting” to it. Presumably, it was he who had gotten the interview with the Mahdi Army commander back in summer. (If so, since this is a really important and exclusive interview, Hussein should have been given a full byline rather than letting the two overpaid white guys swagger around with all the glory.)
The article gave the following details:

The mid-level Mahdi commander… said the group sent to Lebanon was called the Ali al-Hadi Brigade, named for one of two imams buried at the Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The bombing of that shrine in February unleashed the fury of Shiite militias and accelerated sectarian violence.
According to the Mahdi commander, the brigade was organized and dispatched by a senior Mahdi officer known as Abu Mujtaba. It went by bus to Syria in July, and was then led across the border into Lebanon, he said. He said the fighters were from Diwaniya and Basra, as well as from the Shiite neighborhoods of Shoala and Sadr City in Baghdad.
“They travel as normal people from Iraq to Syria,” one of the militiamen said. “Once they get to Syria, fighters in Syria take them in.”

The anonymous US official is quoted in the piece as expressing the judgment that,

While Iran wants a stable Iraq… it sees an advantage in “managed instability in the short term” to bog down the American military and defeat the Bush administration’s objectives in the region.
“There seems to have been a strategic decision taken sometime over late winter or early spring by Damascus, Tehran, along with their partners in Lebanese Hezbollah, to provide more support to Sadr to increase pressure on the U.S.,” the American intelligence official said.

Of course, US officials would have a much improved ability to understand Iran’s true goals and motivations inside Iraq if they were ever allowed to actually talk to them, as opposed merely to trying to intuit their intentions from afar…
The US official is quoted as saying that some of the Sadrist fighters who went to Lebanon “were present during the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel this summer, though there was no indication they had taken part in the fighting.”
And the article had this:

Asked what the militia members had learned, the official replied, “Weapons, bomb-making, intelligence, assassinations, the gambit of skill sets.”

H’mm. That would be “gamut” of skill-sets, I believe, not “gambit”. (Such ignorance at the NYT– or the CIA… I am shocked, shocked!)
Anyway, reading that, I thought that what I most hope that the Mahdi Army people learned from Hizbullah was not technical skills like those mentioned but the more important skills of discipline, command and control, and operational security. It is in the realm of these latter kinds of skills that Lebanese Hizbullah has notably excelled– and it is these kinds of skills that the paramilitary groups battling the US occupation in Iraq most notably seem to lack.
For example, the Mahdi Army itself has reportedly splintered into numerous tiny fractions and factions, some with apparently cross-cutting goals. This has horrendous effects for, first and foremost, the civilian population of Iraq. But it also greatly complicates the search for a new and sustainable political entente within Iraq, and makes considerably harder the prospect of being able to negotiate any kind of orderly exit of the US forces from the country.
It is quite understandable to me that, in the circumstances of the immediate period after the US invasion, the Mahdi Army should have grown up into such a sprawling, factionalizable constellation of entitites. (And of course, the policy pursued in Iraq since 2003 by the US, and perhaps also by the Iranians, has strongly stoked that tendency towards factionalism at all levels of Iraqi society.) But now, if a reasonable political and military de-escalation is to be achieved in Iraq, then surely it is better to support the emergence of larger, more unified political entities that have that have the unity of command required to deliver on agreements reached and also, potentially, to allow for a stronger form of accountability to the general Iraqi public.
Throughout history, once strong nationalist forces have been able to throw off the forces of foreign invasion and colonialism, most of the men (and women) who took up arms in the nationalist struggle have been successfully reintegrated back into normal civilian life. But how you get from “here” to “there” in Iraq still looks extremely difficult. I would say that if we see all the main blocs in Iraqi society develop more coherent and disciplined internal decisionmaking structures, along with more civility towards other social and political trends within the nation and a readiness to participate in civilian political life, these developments would all be very helpful for everyone concerned. Hizbullah has gone a considerable distance down that path in recent years and is probably in a good position to help the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement more broadly to develop in this direction.