Sadr Surrenders, MSM Declares Him Victor

Life imitates an Ace of Spades parody.  See, they really are beyond parody.

And I’m beginning to discern a pattern here.  It’s getting difficult to imagine what could possibly be considered a loss for Sadr.  I’m picturing Mark Kukis writing this on April 30, 1945:

Adolph Hitler wins another round

The German leader today defied Allied attempts to detain him, successfully taking his own life in a major setback for the U.S. war effort.

In other amusing news, the Iranian government announces its vehement opposition to the force agreements between the U.S. and the Iraqi government that numerous lefties keep insisting is an Iranian stooge, this after last week’s meeting in which an envoy of that supposedly “more pro-Iranian than Sadr” Iraqi government met with Iranian representatives to complain about the caches of Iranian weapons they keep finding in the hands of Sadrists.

That’s a topic perhaps worth visiting in-depth here.  Why do so many commentators claim Maliki’s SCII/Dawa are more pro-Iranian than Sadr?  The answer is, because until fairly recently, they were. 

The Badr movement was based in and funded by Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.  Sadr was always in (of course) Sadr City.  The former needed Iranian succor, the latter could preach Shia nationalism from within the imperfect (his father was killed by Saddam) protection of the slums.  In the 1980s there’s no question the Badr people were closer to Iran, and probably in the 1990s as well.

However, when the Badrists won elective office, they no longer needed Iran.  They have what they wanted thanks to the U.S., and in their capacity as largest party in Iraq they sit on a gusher of money from $125/bbl oil, exercising control over some $5B/month, far beyond anything Iran could provide them.  SCIRI, their political front,  changed their name to remove “revolution” and more significantly changed their religious allegiance from the scholars in Qom (in Iran) to those in Najaf (in Iraq).  The Badr Brigades, a semiprofessional militia, got jobs in the Army and National Police.

Sadr, meanwhile, is actually residing and studying in Qom, and has ever since Iraq got too hot for him.  See, Sadr has a problem: he doesn’t really run much.  He got a relatively small share of the Shia political pie, and his militias, over which he exercises only the loosest of control, never had any semblance of professionalism and generally didn’t get government jobs because they don’t want to play nice with “the occupiers” and their notions of liberal democracy.  Instead, they started setting up their own little thugocracies, with nasty religious “courts,” beatings for unveiled women, extortion, murder, kidnapping, etc.  Meanwhile, rogue midlevel Sadrists have been cutting their own deals with Iran’s Qods forces, spraying rockets all over Baghdad, occasionally even taking potshots at Sadr’s offices (hence the trip to Qom) — and most relevantly to us, being supplied by Iran with the EFP bombs that are the #1 killer of American soldiers. 

Sadr believed his road to power in Iraq was military, as evidenced by the repeated armed uprisings and demands for U.S troops to leave (which in 2004 would have conveniently left him the preeminent military power in Iraq).  That creates a confluence of interests with Iran, and a schism with all the other Iraqi parties (Shia, Kurd, or Sunni) who are happy with representative democracy - a rift that Maliki has adroitly exploited to line up Iraq’s disparate factions behind him.  

Maliki’s forces have kicked the Sadrists out of Basra and all the other smaller cities in the south, to much local applause (now even noted by the NYT on the front page), and now they’re getting to work on Sadr City itself, all the while complaining to Tehran that they keep finding Iranian weapons whenever they clean out a nest of Sadrists. 

So Juan Cole, Kevin Drum, and the others pushing the “Iranian puppet” line are a decade or two behind the times.  While the Badrists once cleaved to Iran’s bosom, it is now indisputably the Sadrists who have the most relevant relationship and most interests aligned with Tehran.