Reviews
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
Faber, 289pp
The basic fault with the US Iraq ‘strategy’ (if it can be dignified with such a description) is ignorance of Iraq’s history and character. No less a person than Prince Andrew – despite the Royal family normal avoidance of partisan political comments – berated the US government for neglecting the lessons of history. He could never have done so without the agreement of the British government, demonstrating exasperation in Downing Street at the follies of US policy.
Cockburn’s excellent, very readable book underlines the Prince’s observations. He gives an extensive background to the emergence of Muqtada Al-Sadr as the US’s principal headache in Iraq, which he encapsulates thus: ‘Muqtada epitomised the central dilemma of the US in Iraq which it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by elections which would produce a government dominated by the Shia… the Shia parties that were going to triumph in any election would be Islamic parties and some would have close links to Iran.’ This was surely obvious, except to the ideologues who plotted the occupation in Washington. US forces on the ground were no better, behaving like bulls in a china shop: ‘During his year in power as virtual dictator of Iraq Bremer showed a peculiarly bovine inability to learn from his mistakes’.
Perhaps Cockburn should have considered that comparatively, the USA is a young nation. Iraq and Islam have a much longer history, and people in the Middle East have long memories. Placing Sadr is his historical context is one of the most helpful aspects of this book. Indeed, it is not until chapter nine that Cockburn begins anything like a biography of his subject! However, we cannot understand Muqtada and his role in Iraq without this long view. In contrast, as one Shia Iraqi observed, ‘The Americans seem to think… that the history of Iraq started when they invaded in 2003’.
Cockburn gives a brief overview of the history of the Shia in Iraq, correctly emphasising the martyrdom of the great Shia hero Imam Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson, who was trapped and brutally slaughtered, with most of his entourage, in Iraq in 680 by the forces of the tyrant Yazid. Yazid’s forces cut them off from the river, leaving them thirsty in the searing desert heat. He finally beheaded Hussein. For Shia, Yazid has the same demonological connotations as Hitler for Jews and Poles. Every year Shia commemorate this martyrdom at the Ashura festival, often cutting themselves and wailing. As Cockburn observes, Shia see parallels with that event and the present. When US forces trapped Muqtada in Kufa in 2004, he denounced Bush as a Yazid. Cockburn notes that ‘the significance of the reference may have eluded’ the White House, but not Shia.
Linked to this is the Shia practice of following or ‘imitating’ their senior clerics, the Grand Ayatollahs. Probably the most important in Iraq today is Sistani: Cockburn comments that the US forces could never understand that ‘this ageing cleric in his seventies… was going to play a far more important role than themselves in determining the future of Iraq’. This was one reason the Baath regime was so scared when Khomeini triumphed in Iran, since the Shia were also a majority in Iraq. One Iraqi Grand Ayatollah who lauded and sought to emulate the Iranian revolution was Muqtada’s father, Baqir. His opposition to Saddam led to his martyrdom. Again, this is something the US never fully understood. The fact that Muqtada is the progeny of such a leading and recent martyr in a sect of Islam which prizes martyrdom gave the young mullah a unique standing.
Some mullahs opposed this political activism, such as Grand Ayatollah Al-Khoei – whose son Abdul had to flee Iraq after the gulf war, only to be killed, probably by Mutqtada’s supporters. Other Shia joined the Islamist Da’wa party, while others formed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Cockburn shows how the Baath regime brutally repressed them. Many fled abroad, notably to Iran (and Britain). Again, Cockburn helpfully shows how this influenced subsequent events. Inevitably, after the fall of Saddam, many of those who emerged to gain power had previously been in exile in Iran, and so, without any effort on its part, Tehran reaped the benefits of US folly.
This much is well-known. Less obvious is that this damaged the refugees’ legitimacy somewhat, in two ways. Iraqis do not want to be anyone’s puppets, and so a total Iranian takeover was impossible. Moroever, some of the exiles in SCIRI’s military wing, the Badr ‘Brigade’, were implicated in torturing Iraqi POWs in Iran. This left space for a Shia leader with impeccable Iraqi nationalist credentials and clean hands – Muqtada. He had never fled Iraq, staying through the 1991 Shia intifada, the genocidal sanctions, and Saddam’s continued repression. He never sold his soul to either Tehran or Washington. Together with his family heritage, this gives him a legitimacy that cannot be over-emphasised. For all the US complaints of Iranian ‘interference’ and contentions that they are backing Sadr, it is the biggest party in the Iraqi parliament - SCIRI (now called Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council) that is closest to Iran. Washington’s ‘mullahs under the bed’ theorists need to go back to the drawing board.
What emerges from this fascinating book is the wisdom and cunning of the young cleric. To survive as the son of a prominent opponent of Saddam during the dictator’s rule shows no little shrewdness. Cockburn shows how he has often provoked the US only to evade the final consequence and emerge stronger from military setback. If ever there was an Islamic Lenin (‘one step backward to take two steps step forward’) it is Sadr. He knows how far to go and when to stop. He is his own man, co-operating with Iran at times, but at others denouncing his rivals as Iranian stooges. He has called for Sunni-Shia reconciliation, and denounced attacks on Sunnis and Christians. Ironically, the more successful the US is in preventing Al-Qaida attacks on Shia, the more likely is that Sadr’s power-base will broaden.
Cockburn does not spell out what kind of regime Muqtada would establish in Iraq, but while religious, it would not be a clone of Iran. He is as much Iraqi nationalist as Islamist; on both counts he will resist US presence. The Shia have not forgotten their betrayal by the first Bush administration when they rose up against Saddam and were decimated whilst the US looked on.
Cockburn sums-up Sadr as ‘the ultimate American nightmare in Iraq. They had not got rid of Saddam only to see him replaced by a black-turbaned anti-American Shia cleric’. The man who has twice militarily confronted the US may choose to do so again. If so, they can blame no one but themselves.
Anthony McRoy
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