It is hard to see how this week’s behavior of radical Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr is contributing to the prosperity and unity of Iraq, which he swore to uphold when he first entered Parliament. He has withdrawn his 30 MPs, including six Cabinet ministers, from the national unity government of Nuri Al-Maliki in protest that the premier’s Wednesday meeting with President Bush in Jordan. According to Sadr, Maliki hadn’t been authorized by Parliament to meet the US leader.
This is an interesting take on the responsibilities of a prime minister whose country is teetering on the edge of civil war. America is part of the problem. It was therefore entirely right and proper for Maliki to talk to the man who sits at the head of that problem. Iran, too, is part of the problem and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was this week talking to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. That piece of diplomacy was not authorized by the Iraqi Parliament either, but Sadr is not reported to have protested it.
For Sadr to have walked out of the government at such a sensitive time is at best a serious piece of political misjudgment and at worst an ill-intentioned maneuver designed to increase rather than diminish the tensions that are threatening to tear Iraq apart.
Maybe, Sadr has been buoyed up by one estimate that if there were a general election tomorrow, he and his supporters, as opposed to the United Iraqi Alliance of which he was a part when he entered Parliament, would win in all but one or two provinces. It is hard to believe that the majority of Iraqis would indeed vote for this political maverick, whose Mahdi Army is widely believed to make up most of the merciless death squads.
It is even harder to believe that Sadr would be interested in a fair election when he may be coming to believe that he can win power by the gun.
If this grandstanding walkout is indeed a power play, Sadr will have calculated that neither the Iraqi Army nor police nor the Americans can now effectively challenge his Mahdi Army without producing massive protests among Shiites. The Iraqi forces are widely infiltrated by Mahdi Army people. The Americans are assumed to have no appetite for another Kerbala, especially since the Mahdi Army is now probably much stronger. For Sadr, withdrawing from a national unity government with little real power beyond its redoubt in Baghdad’s Green Zone, may seem unimportant, when his own fighters appear to be the real power in large parts of the country.
Maliki’s instincts will almost certainly be to try and persuade Sadr to return to the coalition. Bush almost certainly told the Iraqi premier that he was well rid of the politicians. If he did, Bush is once again plain wrong. Sadr may be a violent and dangerous rabble-rouser, but he also has a solid bloc of support among the Shiite poor. To exclude him is to exclude them. And to exclude them is to exclude any chance of peace.
