The immediate cause of the present developments in Iraq seem to stem from the plan that was described in National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley's November 8, 2006 secret memo (leaked to and reported on by The New York Times) to President Bush. The memo articulated a strategy to politically and militarily neutralize nationalist Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr by fracturing the ruling Shi'ite coalition sponsored that has long been sponsored by Ayatollah Sistani and replacing it with a new coalition made up of SCIRI and Sunni parties. A.K. Gupta has written a terrific article that outlines the many possible outcomes (none of them good) to the Hadley strategy.
The bigger question, though is: Why does the U.S. wants al-Sadr out of the picture? His forces for the most part are not part of the active insurgency. Of the two major Shi'ite militias, his is the least well-armed and has the fewest links to Iran. While "rogue elements" of his Mehdi Army have been blamed for some of the sectarian violence, the worst of the Shi'ite death squads has been the special police commandos of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which since mid-2005 has been staffed with members of the Badr Brigade militia that is part of SCIRI and is heavily supported by Iran. As Gupta reports:
Badr operates death squads under the banner of the special police commandos. Beginning in 2004, U.S. forces organized, trained and equipped the police commandos, drawing from Hussein-era security forces, to create a neo-Baathist militia and death squad that would hunt Sunni insurgents. Under the Iraq government that took power in April 2005, Bayan Jabr, a former high-ranking commander in the Badr Brigade, took control of the commandos as head of the Interior Ministry. Jabr ousted Sunni personnel in the commandos, putting in place up to 3,000 Badr militiamen, and they quickly began a reign of terror against Sunnis in general.
The worst of the death squad activity also suspiciously coincided with the arrival of former US ambassador John Negroponte (infamous for being behind much of the death squad activity in El Salvador during the Reagan administration). Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar has also hinted at this:
The Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group implemented by the Pentagon is regarded by Sunnis and quite a few Shi'ites as being the mastermind of some of the car bombings, assassinations, sabotage, kidnappings and attacks on mosques fueling the civil war. The "Salvador option" has developed into the "Iraqification option". US-trained death squads in Iraq are not much different from the death squads in El Salvador during the 1980s - subordinated to the same "divide and rule" tactics. This is the "civil war" dirty secret: let the Arabs kill one another with the US posing as "victims".
Al-Sadr, while defending his militia's right to defend itself against hardcore Saddamists and Sunni extremists that view Shi'ites as apostates, has made it clear that he deplores the bulk of the death squad activities.
Why then is al-Sadr viewed as such a threat by the United States? Could it be the fact that, unlike SCIRI, he opposes the presence of US troops and rejects the division of Iraq into semi-autonomous federal states? Could it be that he opposes passage of the proposed hydrocarbon law? Is it because he is amenable to a coalition with moderate Sunnis, which could end the sectarian strife and make the presence of US troops harder to rationalize?
It seems like the Hadley plan is to co-opt SCIRI away from Iranian influence and to ultimately place its leader al-Hakim in power in Baghdad.
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