The unsurprising announcement that there are to be no further reductions in British forces in Iraq sends a quite simple message: Neither Britain nor America has in sight an end game for their ill-considered and ill-executed adventure in Iraq since 2003.
The plan had been to cut the present force of 4,100 British troops to 2,500 next month. This would have gone down to practically zero by this time next year, when the cut-and-run policy from the Iraq escapade could be blamed on the new tenant of the White House.
If only it were so simple. For the time being, they can blame the current setback on that arch-nemesis Moqtada Sadr. But even that doesn’t work. Sadr didn’t start the latest round of fighting in Basra. The ill-advised and strategically challenged prime minister, Nuri Al-Maliki, did. He gambled that he had enough muscle in the Iraqi Army to drive Sadr’s militia from running Basra. So far, he has gambled and lost; and now there must be serious doubts about whether he can continue in office and pretend to be the prime minister of all Iraq and all Iraqis for much longer. Al-Maliki belongs to the Dawa party, the smallest of the three major Shiite politico-militia formations in Iraq. These organisms are much more than a political party in the normal Western European and American parlance. The term “movement” is a better fit; they are, by parts, popular grouping, militia and clan interest.
The two biggest Shiite movements are those of the Martyr Sadr and Mahdi Army of the Sadrist clan, headed by Moqtada Sadr, and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI) and Badr Corps militia of the Hakim clan, currently headed by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim. The Hakim clan is currently favored by the Americans — because they are the opponents of Moqtada and the Sadrists, whom the US Eagle Corps (another militia movement, I suppose) see as the tools of Iran.
This is bizarre, because the Badr Corps and Hakim interest is closer in many respects to Tehran than is Sadr, who is a firm Iraqi nationalist. He wants Iraq to remain a unified nation, whereas Hakim wants it to be loose federation, with Basra and the south becoming an autonomous “super region”, which would be close to Iran, where the Badr Corps was formed in exile during the Iran-Iraq war.
Al-Maliki decided to strike against the Sadr militia because he feared that Sadr was bound to win in the provincial elections due later this year. He ordered the Iraqi Army into Basra as negotiations with multinational companies were opening in Amman, Jordan, for upgrading the Rumailiya oilfield and developing three new oilfields in the desert to the west of it.
Last time round, four years ago, Sadr boycotted the elections. This time, he won’t and he’ll get control of the Basra region. This will underline to the Americans that they may not be able to control the oil and energy politics of the region. This impression was compounded by the announcement of the Swiss contract with Tehran on March 17 to supply 100 trillion cubic meters of gas annually from 2011. To add insult to injury, the Swiss foreign minister, Micheline Chalmy-Rey, headscarfed, was photographed shaking the hand of President Ahmadinejad — the day Vice President Dick Cheney began his ill-fated visit last month to stiffen local powers against Iran.
To sum up: The latest developments suggest real problems for the current British posture in Iraq — and the American “surge” strategy, for that matter. For they know, now more than ever, that Sadr is the most powerful local force in southern and central Iraq.
British Defense Secretary Des Browne’s explanation for the pause in British withdrawal to Parliament — “in the light of the week’s events, it is prudent that we pause any further reductions while the current situation is unfolding,” doesn’t quite cover the water front. This is oil politics, and global oil politics at that. When one of the Basra pipelines was blown up last week, the global price per barrel shot from $90 to $109 — it’s since been repaired, both pipe and price.
But this is now the Great Game of the age of globalized economics — in which Whitehall and Washington may not have the final say, and rather less, on present form, than Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh.
