Iraq: Divide and rule– or national unity?

The Bush administration and its hangers-on in the US MSM have concocted a narrative of what the US is doing in Iraq– and throughout the whole Middle East, except Israel– as being to support the “moderates” against the “extremists”. (How amazingly unoriginal of them.) In Iraq, Moqtada Sadr has been firmly pinned with the Bushists’ “extremist” label, while another Shiite cleric, Abdul-Aziz Hakim, has been given the dubious benefit of winning the “American Idol” award.
In order to support this narrative, the spinmeisters have leaked and propagated (and quite possibly also exaggerated) much scaremongering “news” about the Sadrists’ various operations. The intentionally Satanic image of Sadr published on the cover of Newsweek a couple of weeks ago was the single most egregious product of this spin, but it really has become very pervasive over the past month or so… At the same time, these spinmeisters have been notably silent about the many respects in which the actions of Hakim and his followers have been as abusive of human rights as those of the Sadrists, if not more so. And they’ve also been strangely quiet about the lengthy and close relationship between Hakim and the mullahs’ regime in Teheran, while they have tried to smear Sadr as little more than “a puppet of Tehran” while remaining largely quiet on what seem to be some seriously Iraqi-nationalist aspects of his thought and his behavior…
Truth, the first casualty of war. ‘Twas ever thus, I guess.
Many of these same aspects of US spin were noticeable back during the lengthy government-formation process in Baghdad at the beginning of 2006. Heck, even Juan Cole jumped on the bandwagon of describing Hakim as “the strongest leader” in the Shiite coalition, despite some clear evidence that that was not the case…
Well, here we are, a year later, and the Bushists are now quite openly pushing for a Hakimist putsch against the Sadrists. One intriguing account of how this is playing out on the ground comes in today’s WaPo article by Sudarsan Raghavan. Raghavan seems to have traveled much more outside the Green Zone (and outside the heavily fortified coccoon of the house the NYT used to maintain in non-GZ Baghdad) than venerable “white” NYT reporters like John Burns, etc. And he conveys a noticeably more skeptical attitude toward the broad narrative of the Bushist spinmeisters than Burns ever did.
He says of Sadr and Hakim,

they both lead militias that are widely alleged to run death squads.
But in the view of the Bush administration, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is a moderate and Moqtada al-Sadr is an extremist…

Good for him, making that clear near the top of his piece.
Raghavan does some reporting from Karrada, which he describes as “a mostly Shiite Baghdad neighborhood [of Baghdad]”, containing both middle-class and working-class sections. He conveys the clear impression that Hakim’s influence there and, that of the much revered and generally quietist Shiite marja’, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have both waned considerably in recent months, while that of the Sadrists has grown.
He also reports this:

In many circles, Iraqis question whether Hakim and other so-called moderates can curb the growing power of Sadr.
“I have serious doubts about Mr. Hakim’s influence among the Shiites, and I have serious doubts of Hashemi becoming the leader of Sunnis,” [Baghdad political analyst Wamid] Nadhmi said.
It’s a sentiment shared in Karrada. “Al-Hakim is not loved by the people,” said Abdul Amir Ali, a burly Shiite shopkeeper. “People love the Islamic Dawa Party and Maliki because they don’t have militias.”
In the sidewalk restaurant where Sadr’s poster hangs, its owner, Ali Hussein, points at clusters of young men nearby. They are all Mahdi Army, he said. And so is he.
Hakim, he said, made a fatal mistake by meeting Bush. In today’s Iraq, credibility and power are measured by opposition to the United States.
“At this time, whoever has his hands with the Americans or Jews is not an Iraqi,” said Hussein, as he chopped up cubes of lamb. “So how could Hakim put his hands with the Americans? There will be tensions because Sayyed Moqtada Sadr is a revolutionary man, like his father. Even if Hakim tries to come back to Sadr, Sadr will never receive his hand.”
If the rift between Hakim and Sadr deepens, moderate Shiites fear, all Iraqis may suffer. “It should not leave any shadow on a fragile situation on Iraq,” said [Ali] Dabbagh, the government spokesman. “Iraq cannot absorb such a shock.”

Meanwhile, Reidar Visser has also weighed in with some of his own observations on the chances of the Bushites’ latest anti-Sadr campaign. These comments come in the last half of this posting on his website, the first of which provides a fairly full digest and review of what looks to be an intriguing book, by former British insider Mark Etherington, of the mistakes made during the US forces’ 2004 campaign against Moqtada al-Sadr.
Regarding Washington’s current attempt to build an anti-Sadrist coalition in Iraq, Visser writes,

Even on the surface, such a new coalition would have obvious problems. Although the parliamentary arithmetic might support it, it would be a huge gamble to isolate one of the few blocs inside the Iraqi parliament that can claim to have a degree of support on the Iraqi streets (rumours suggest that the other Sadrist grouping, the Fadila, would also remain outside government). Also, it could cause a dramatic reduction of grassroots Shiite support for the government without any appreciable strengthening of its Sunni level of support (reportedly, only the Iraqi Islamic Party would be involved); in this case a perpetuation of the Sunni insurgency along with increased Sadrist violence might be expected – and this on top of problems already underway in Basra with the Fadila. And above all, this would be just another deal among the cadres of the Green Zone – many of them returnees from exile – without any substantial links to the millions of “ordinary Iraqis” who care less about ideological bickering and the finer points of federalism than about security and services. To a non-US observer it really is difficult to grasp the logic of the policy now being proposed.

Anyway, the whole of Visser’s essay there deserves close attention.
Finally, I see from this recent AP report that delegates from all the major Shiite parties in Iraq have today been gathering in Najaf, with the aim of meeting both Sistani and Sadr there. The AP writer, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, says these delegates went, “to seek [Sistani’s] blessing for a new coalition that would promote national reconciliation.” They were also, “expected to meet with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr about joining the political process and reining in his fighters.”
Abdul-Zahra also wrote this:

In Thursday’s meeting, the group wants to assure al-Sistani that the new coalition would not break apart the Shiite bloc, said officials from several Shiite parties. Potential members of the coalition said they have been negotiating for two weeks, and now want the blessing of al-Sistani, whose word many Shiites consider binding.
The [‘national reconciliation movement in question’] is backed by the U.S. government, said Sami al-Askari, a member of the Dawa party and an adviser to [PM] al-Maliki.
“I met the American ambassador in Baghdad and he named this front the ‘front of the moderates,’ and they (the Americans) support it,” al-Askari said

It’s not clear to me why a Maliki aide would consider that having the backing of the Americans for any given plan would be considered a plus…. But politics is a strange business, eh?
In this separate and apparently earlier AP report, Abdul-Zahra had written,

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is considering a one-month unilateral cease-fire and may push his followers to rejoin the political process, three weeks after they walked out of parliament and the Cabinet to protest the prime minister‘s meeting with President Bush , officials close to the anti-American militia leader said Wednesday.
Al-Sadr‘s call for a halt to fighting could come after Thursday, when a delegation representing the seven Shiite groups that form the largest bloc in Iraq ‘s parliament is to travel to the holy city of Najaf to meet separately with al-Sadr and the country‘s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani…
[An] official close to al-Sadr did not speak about the planned truce directly, but said when asked about it that “the security situation will improve in the coming month.”
Even if al-Sadr commands his militia, the Madhi Army, to halt sectarian attacks for a month, questions remain as to whether violence would decrease. The militia is believed to be increasingly fragmented, with some factions no longer reporting to him, and a call for a truce could further divide it.
In exchange for a halt in fighting, al-Sadr‘s followers want officials from al-Hakim‘s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to make a promise in front of al-Sistani that they will not sideline al-Sadr‘s movement, said a member of al-Sadr‘s group.
The Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni coalition was not a done deal, though. Several Shiites complained about conditions set by the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, which they said could jeopardize an agreement.
“The demands of the Iraqi Islamic Party are not logical and it is hard to implement them,” said Humam Hamoudi, a SCIRI lawmaker. For example, the Sunni party wants all checkpoints leading to and from Baghdad to have an equal number of Shiite and Sunni guards, he said.

So there we are. Lots going on. Let’s hope that Iraq’s political and community leaders of all complexions can find a way to reweave national unity amongst themselves and generate a national leadership of sufficient legitimacy and trustworthiness that it can immediately start negotiations for a full, speedy, and orderly withdrawal of the US-led occupoation force from their country. That would be farmore constructive narrative than the “divide and rule” one the Bushists are trying to pursue.