Muqtada Sadr featured in Newsweek

At last an American MSM publication (other than JWN) seems to be starting to find the right way to approach the question of the continuing government-formation impasse in Iraq. Newsweek’s Rod Nordland has a mid-length piece in this week’s Newsweek titled Sadr Strikes. The subtitle is: Deadly Vision: U.S. forces once had the renegade cleric in their cross hairs. Now he’s too strong—and too popular—to confront.
And for good measure, alongside that article, they’re running this interview with Fatah al-Sheikh, described as “a trusted confidant of Moqtada al-Sadr and editor of the cleric’s personal newspaper, Ishraqat al-Sadr”.
Nordland is quite right to focus right now on the “kingmaking” role that Sadr now plays. He writes:

The American military no longer talks about killing or capturing Sadr; in fact, they’re careful to not even point a finger of blame at him. Why not? In part because Iraq has become an unstable democracy, and Sadr has massive support where it counts—in the streets. He has also learned the art of crafting different messages for different audiences. Even while his black-clad militiamen struck at Sunni targets recently, Sadr took the moral high ground and appealed for calm. “It is one Islam and one Iraq,” he said.
Sadr has joined the political process, with stunning results. The current prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, effectively owes his job to the renegade cleric. “Despite the fact that Sadr was not himself an elected official, he and his followers were able to play the role of ‘kingmaker’ within the Shiite coalition,” says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Sadr’s group has 30 seats in the new assembly that was elected last December, but the Sadrist party is allied with a larger Shia coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance. With Sadr’s blessing, his followers cast the deciding vote making Jaafari the choice of the UIA for prime minister.

One of the refreshing things about the Nordland piece is that not once does he refer to SCIRI or its leader Abdul-Aziz Hakim as being “the most powerful force in Iraqi politics”, or the like. Indeed, he doesn’t mention either SCIRI or Hakim at all!
Boy, that makes a change, after all the pumping-up of SCIRI’s role we’ve heard from the US MSM over the past few months.
Here on JWN, I’ve been consistently noting the Sadrists’ success in the Dec. 15 election– back as long ago as this Jan. 1 post, this Jan. 20 post, and this Feb. 11 post. Or even this Dec. 22 post.
In all of those, I was leaning heavily on the detailed, expert work of the western world’s leading UIA-ologist, Reidar Visser, and also on my own other readings, gut feelings, and analysis… But meanwhile, Juan Cole and just about the whole of the US MSM have been continuing to parrot the description of SCIRI/Hakim as “the most powerful force in Iraq”, etc, etc….
All of which must have made it very difficult for anyone to understand why Zal Khalilzad was so unsuccessful in imposing his favored candidate (SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi) on the rest of the UIA, as I noted here recently. In this early-February analysis, Visser provided his own best explanation for the misperceptions of western analysts, most of which he attributed to SCIRI’s fairly successful, west-oriented (or should I say occidented?) media operation…
But enough of my longstanding “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me and Reidar?” rant. What about Nordland’s piece?
Well, for starters, he’d have done well to have read or spoken to Reidar Visser about all this… a long time ago! As long ago as early February, Visser calculated that the Sadrists (pro-Muqtada plus Fadila flavors) accounted for a total of 45 seats— as opposed to SCIRI’s total of 29. (And as opposed to Nordland’s own figure of “30” seats for the Sadrist party in the new Assembly.)
And then, in much of the body of his piece, Nordland seems to be following the very standard, US-government-issue line that portrays Muqtada as only a violent and divisive troublemaker. For example, he writes of Muqtada’s behind-the-scenes role as the real power behind the Jaafari nomination that:

That has everyone else alarmed. Sunnis don’t want a prime minister beholden to the man they believe is responsible for sectarian hit squads, which are now claiming as many as 70 lives a day in Baghdad. Kurds are wary of Sadr’s anti-federalist stance, which could limit Kurdish autonomy in the north. The result has been to stymie formation of a new government three and a half months after elections were held. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been urging moderate Shia leaders to join with Kurds and Sunnis to break the deadlock by choosing a compromise candidate. But the situation is stalemated.

Well, yes and no… Some (but notably not all) Sunnis have said publicly that they don’t want Jaafari as PM, as have a larger proportion of Kurds. Indeed, there in the Newsweek interview with Fatah al-Sheikh, Sheikh says:

Our newspaper has interviewed Sunni leaders who say Sayyid Moqtada is welcome in Sunni cities—Ramadi, Salahuddin, Fallujah. As you well know, there are wise people in both sects.

Meanwhile, ever since the December election, Khalilzad has been very, very busy in Iraq, whipping up opposition to the Sadr-Jaafari axis. Surely it is these interventions from the occupying power— which have recently included some very Keystone Cops-ish interventions from Czar George and Condi Rice themselves– that should be seen as the primary cause of the continuing “stalemate” in the government-formation system.
Nordland quotes a very telling comment that Khalilzad made “to” Muqtada Sadr through the open pages of al-Hayat daily. He doesn’t give a date for it; and I must have missed it at the time– but here it is:

“Coalition forces are present in Iraq on the basis of an invitation from the government and you are part of it… You [i.e., Muqtada] cannot be a part of the government while at the same time you issue statements demanding that we leave.”

Amazing! There in a nutshell we have an open expression of the real reason for the fervor of the US campaign against Sadr and Jaafari… It is indeed all about the position the Sadrists have maintained that the US should undertake a speedy exit from Iraq. (As I wrote here, just last week.)
So much for the myth that Washington is prepared to treat either the present lame-duck Iraqi government or the incoming Iraqi government as actually being sovereign governments, entitled to make their own decisions about whether the US troops should stay or leave…
And here, from the interview with Fatah al-Sheikh, is Sheikh’s description of the core of Sadr’s political deal with Jaafari:

Jaafari promised Moqtada that should he become prime minister with Moqtada’s support, he would … demand a timetable for the departure of Coalition troops from Iraq, the return of sovereignty to Iraq, the provision of services to the people and about nine other items. Dr. Jaafari agreed and submitted himself as an obedient soldier of Sayyid Moqtada.

I imagine Jaafari might disagree just a bit with the “obedient soldier” part of that description… Also, I’d love to know what the “nine other items” were, and whether one of them was the decentralization-of-the-state issue (sometimes, quite misleadingly, called the “federalization” issue)…
I just finally want to note one slightly bizarre effect of Nordland’s complete failure to mention either SCIRI or Hakim. This is to make it seem that there might be a PM candidate out there who does not share all the “faults” that his article mentions with regard to the Sadr-Jaafari axis… Such as, that the Sadrists are linked to a viciously sectarian militia, that they want to “stir up trouble” for the Americans, etc etc. But what about SCIRI in these regards? SCIRI is linked to a militia that has been far more viciously sectarian than the Sadrist militia. And SCIRI favors a political program that is far more exclusionary towards the Sunnis than the Sadrist program, etc., etc.
Still, maybe we should be thankful for small advances in the realm of telling the truth about what’s been happening politically in Iraq over these past 110 days… At least, Newsweek seems to be getting the story about 60% right. (Time for Juan Cole to catch up, perhaps?)