Over at HotAir, Allahpundit lives up to his Eeyore reputation (I think he’s reveling in it, really) while citing a Cordesman piece.Â
Cordesman’s take is, shall we say, excessively conspiratorial:
The current fighting, which the government portrays as a crackdown on criminality, is better seen as a power grab, an effort by Mr. Maliki and the most powerful Shiite political parties to establish their authority over Basra and the parts of Baghdad that have eluded their grasp…
Considering that the militias’ use of force is illegal while the SCII/Dawa/Fadhila alliance controls the government’s use of force by dint of having won the most votes in the elections, that amounts to six of one and half dozen of another.
Sure, there’s politics involved here, just not the kind Cordesman’s talking about. Like them or not, SCII/Dawa won the most votes in the election. The Kurds don’t like Sadr either. The Sunnis despise him. Politically, that lack of friends makes it easier to go after him.
Cordesman’s logic from here is frankly bizarre:
Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council were likely to be routed because they were seen as having failed to bring development and government services…
His evidence?
An ABC News poll released this month showed that only two-thirds of the Shiite population in Basra had a favorable opinion of the central government,
Gee, only two-thirds. Anyone remember the last time our central government polled that high anywhere?
  …only 14 percent of all residents felt they could move about safely…
… which is largely because of Sadr’s goons.  You can see in the D3 systems poll that there were similar numbers in Anbar in summer 2007; it didn’t bode well for Al Qaeda then and doesn’t bode well for Sadr now.
The last poll numbers for Dawa’s Maliki show him with 52% approval among Shia; not stellar but not certainly not “about to be routed” numbers. And look at the “who do you blame for violence†questions; the militias (e.g. Sadr) are viewed as the biggest problem, and in that same poll only four percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on the Iraqi Army, Sadr’s main foe these last several days. Only in Sadr City does Sadr have support rivaling that of the national government.
AP also suggests the fact Iraqi officials are saying they went to Iran in order to secure an agreement under which Sadr’s forces surrender the streets is a negative, but that information was more likely a deliberate, none-too-subtle attack that may not even be true. It’s Maliki’s way of publicly digging at Sadr for being Iran’s catspaw, something that Shia Iraqis dislike, Kurds get angry about, and Sunni Iraqis really flip out over. Politics.
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Does the democratically elected government of Iraq now control Basra(h)?
If not, this is not victory, and no one has “surrendered.”
If so, great (I think).
What’s missing from your commentary, Dave, is that Iraq has a parliamentary system, that nobody has an outight majority, and that Maliki’s militia are just as much “goons” as Moqtada al-Sadr’s.
Whose are the government forces? Both? Neither?
Additionally, I don’t think we have enough details about what units are participating in the conflict to draw reasonable conclusions. If the Interior Ministry’s Iraqi Police Service is participating, that’s just the Badr militia by another name.
On another note, what exactly is wrong with the government of Iraqi fighting for control of those parts of the country that have “…until now, eluded its grasp?”
I can’t really speak to Dawa, but Cordesman’s logic about ISCI is correct: most parties agree that they will have a hard time with the Sadrists in the upcoming elections. So this can be seen as one of their goals – to weaken the Sadrists that is – ahead of such elections. But the fact remains that what kicked it off – criminality and lawlessness in S Iraq – is a legit reason for the central government to assert its authority.
What’s missing from your commentary, Dave, is that Iraq has a parliamentary system, that nobody has an outight majority, and that Maliki’s militia are just as much “goons†as Moqtada al-Sadr’s.
This comment illustrates such a complete lack of comprehension of how a parliamentary systems works it makes me weep.
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