The rhetoric is triumphalist, and the storyline is simple and consistent. "We have made up our minds to enter this battle and we will continue till the end. No retreat," said Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki on Thursday. "As we speak Iraqis are waging a tough battle against militia fighters and criminals in Basra, many of whom have received arms and training and funding from Iran," said President George W. Bush in Dayton, Ohio. But the reality is less persuasive.
The offensive in Basra could only have been launched with the support of the United States, since Prime Minister Al-Maliki has admitted that he "cannot move a company of troops" without American consent. It is really aimed mainly at the Mehdi army, the militia that backs Moqtada Sadr. And it is not likely to succeed.
Moqtada Sadr is the main rival to Al-Maliki's Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and its associated Badr militia for the loyalty of Iraq's Shiite majority. Basra is a key battleground for this struggle, not only because its two million people are almost all Shiite, but because most of Iraq's oil is produced nearby and exported through Basra. The militias need money, and Basra, with its flow of cash and oil, is the best place to cream it off.
The Mehdi and Badr militias have been waging a low-intensity battle in Basra for control of these resources for more than a year, and you can see why Al-Maliki would want to use the army to tip the balance in favor of his side. You can also see why the Bush administration wants Al-Maliki to win, for his party supports - indeed, depends on - a continued US military presence in Iraq, while Moqtada Sadr insists that all US troops go home. But it's harder to see why they thought Al-Maliki could win.
At the time of writing, four days into the battle in Basra, the Iraqi Army's offensive seems to have stalled, while new fronts have opened up in other cities across the south of Iraq and in Baghdad, already the scene of massive protests by Moqtada Sadr's supporters. Unless Al-Maliki and the US commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, have reliable intelligence that the Mehdi organization is less united and determined than it seems to be, this offensive doesn't make a lot of sense, especially from the point of view of the White House.
As it was, the "surge" looked likely to deliver what the Bush administration most wanted: An apparent stabilization in Iraq that would let it leave office without having to admit failure. The more wordly-wise members of the administration would initially have seen this simply as a device to put the ultimate blame for failure on the incoming administration instead, but maybe they have started to believe their own propaganda.
The "stabilization is more apparent than real, for two reasons. The new Sunni "allies" of the United States include a lot of people who were trying to kill American troops a year ago, and may well return to that activity once they have dealt with the "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" extremists who were giving the Sunni resistance a bad name. And on the Shiite side, Moqtada Sadr was standing by to push out Al-Maliki's American-backed government as soon as US troop numbers in Iraq fell.
Three months ago, cynical advisers to President Bush might have said "So what?" The bad things would happen early in the next administration, which looked almost certain to be Democratic, and Bush would get away clean. But now it looks (at least to some Republicans) as though Sen. John McCain has a real chance to win the presidency and continue Bush's military commitment in Iraq.
Maybe they said to themselves: Let's not leave McCain a ticking time bomb. Let's go after Moqtada Sadr, starting with his cash flow, which depends heavily on his militia in Basra. (Sadr does not get arms or money from Iran, and the Bush people must know that despite what they say in public.) So Al-Maliki got his marching orders, and the battle for Basra began.
If this is what happened, it is a classic case of hope triumphing over experience. The Iraqi Army probably cannot beat the Mehdi militia in open battle in Iraq's big cities, and it may be left severely discredited if it tries. The US Army certainly can beat Sadr's militia, just as it has done in two previous rounds of fighting, but that would be followed by a reversion to the guerrilla attacks that were causing such high US casualties before Sadr's cease-fire. Or maybe Petraeus and Al-Maliki know something about the weaknesses of the Mehdi Army that nobody else does. They have about a week to prove it.
