Najaf: turning point for whom?

One week into the present Battle of Najaf it seems clearer than ever that Allawi and his US backers are determined to win this battle in a way that imposes a humiliating defeat on Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
From his side Moqtada also seems to have dug in his heels. The possibility of a face-saving-all-round outcome seems to have almost disappeared.
It is not yet clear who will “win” this showdown. Militarily, of course a large, very well-armed US force, backed up by extremely lethal airpower and augmented by some local Iraqi forces would seem to have a large advantage over a few hundred– perhaps 1,500 at most–lightly armed Mahdi fighters. (Urban fighting, however, can be really brutal. Do the US Marines there really have the guts for it?)
But as every first lieutenant should understand, the “Battle” of Najaf will not be won on the military battlefield. It will be won in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and in that arena the US/Allawi forces are almost bound to lose any all-out showdown.
This morning, Najaf’s deputy governor, Jawdat Kadam Najim al-Kuraishi, resigned in protest at the US/Allawi actions in his city. The governor, Adnan Zurufi, is a former Iraqi exile who was installed as governor by Bremer, back in early May. He has not resigned. But today, according to this story in Aljazeera.net a majority of the members of the provincial council also joined Kuraishi in reisgning.
Aljazeera also reported that,

the director of tribal affairs at the Iraqi Interior ministry announced his resignation through Aljazeera and said he could no longer work with the interim government in good faith given the ‘carnage and barbaric aggression of the US-led forces in Najaf’…
Meanwhile, Basra’s deputy governor for administrative affairs, Hajj Salam Awdeh al-Maliky, warned that he may openly join al-Sadr’s fight if his offer to send 1000 Iraqi police, special security and national guardsmen to Najaf is refused by the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Some national guardsmen in Basra had even said they would not hesitate to join al-Sadr’s militia if al-Maliky’s offer was rejected.

On the BBC-TV news tonight, we saw Iraqi Vice-President Ibrahim Jafaari decrying the violence… And on the religious-affairs front, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is quoted on the BBC website as saying (through a spokesman) that, “he would not have left Najaf if he knew how bad things would get.”
Altogether, I would say, extremely inauspicious circumstances for Iraq to be holding its nationwide, 1,000-person confab on how the next step in preparing the elections gets organized. That confab is scheduled for this Sunday! It has been delayed once; but this time Allawi is insisting it go ahead without further delay. It seems truly bizarre and extremely politically counter-productive to be doing that in the middle of a confrontation as momentous as the one in Najaf.
Sistani, I should note, is probably one of the best hopes left for helping to mediate a negotiated climbdown from the present escalation (if such is still possible)…

Sistani’s presence in London–allegedly for heart treatment–is interesting. It seems clear to me that he was intentionally spirited out of Najaf just before the US/Allawi assault against the city began. Do his latest reported words indicate that he now resents the people who did that to him?
I’d love to know exactly how the whole “heart problem/need for treatment” story actually developed for him… I think he’d had a heart problem for a while. Did some US major go up to him and say, “Sorry about that dicky heart of yours. It would be too bad to put more stress on it, wouldn’t it? How about a nice little trip to London?”
Where did I read that the Iranians had offered to give him treatment there, but he turned it down, choosing London instead?
… Anyway, it’s late. I don’t have time to write all I wanted to here. I just wanted to note that, though the western media generally seem to refer to only one possibly comparable precedent for what is going on in Najaf–namely, the confrontation in Fallujah back in April– I think that for the people of Najaf there are probably a few others that come to mind. Principally, the battles in Najaf itself, and in Karbala in March 1991, when the people of the two holy cities rose against Saddam– after hearing President George H.W. Bush’s voice on the radio explicitly calling on the people and army of Iraq to rise against Saddam— and the US forces who were poised at and also over the Iraqi border after having “liberated” Kuwait just stood pat and watched as Saddam’s ground forces and helicopters then proceeded to mow them down.
(For US movie buffs, an echo of that incident could be seen in “The Three Kings”. Reality was far worse than what was protrayed there.)
So yes, an uprising against an unjust government. Najaf has seen that before. The carnage in 1991 was horrendous.
Or, for another relevant precedent Najafis and others might look to, there is Beirut in 1982, when the Palestinian and Shi-ite forces holed up in the city held out against the besieging Israeli forces for six weeks, before a last-minute negotiation allowed the PLO forces to leave the city, many areas of which had by then been bombed to smithereens by the Israelis.
Over the years that followed 1982, Lebanon’s Shi-ites suffered numerous additional onslaughts from Israel, in which many of their cities and towns were very badly damaged, and hundreds of thousands of people repreatedly had to flee the areas of the worst fighting. Those upheavals and losses, and all that terrible suffering did not break the Lebanese Shit-ites’ will. Insetad, Hizbollah systematically organized the people into a calm, disciplined, and resilient support force for them.
Hizbollah, of course, had not existed prior to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. By 2000 it had succeeded–using extremely low-tech military tactics but superb popular organizing– to push Israel’s extremely well-equipped (and US-financed) armies out of the country. (Okay, give or take a Shebaa Farm or two.)
I’ve written quite a bit about that whole phenomenon in the past. You could start by reading this JWN post, and then this one.
I have no means of knowing yet whether Moqtada al-Sadr will turn out to having organizing skills on the order of Hizbollah’s. But you can bet that he and his people have been thinking about how to do just about exactly the same things Hizbollah has achieved…