Tom Lasseter--still covering Iraq for Knight Ridder--says that Allawi is in big trouble:
Posted by DeLong at August 7, 2004 09:23 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postKR Washington Bureau | 08/06/2004 | Deepening anti-U.S. rage casts doubt on Iraq leaders' ability to restore order: After the past two days of fighting in southern and central Iraq, the difference between firebrand cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi couldn't be any more clear: Al Sadr has an army, and Allawi does not. In Iraq, security is politics. When Allawi took office, the self-styled strongman lost little time before declaring that his government wouldn't tolerate the insurgency that's swept the country. But as in previous battles, when al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia began to overrun Najaf and several neighborhoods from Baghdad to Basra, the Iraqi police force and national guard fought for a little while, then ran. And as in previous battles, Iraq's Achilles' heel was revealed: To defend their country, Allawi and the interim government must go to the American military, an institution that's widely reviled by many Iraqis as an occupational force run amok.
Allawi's Cabinet has approved an emergency provision that would allow for something like a state of emergency to be declared, and he's expected to announce at least a partial state of emergency at a news briefing scheduled for Saturday. But even if such a measure were imposed, it's not clear that Iraqi forces have the training or equipment to enforce it outside Baghdad, a capital that's looking increasingly besieged. As Marine Col. Anthony Haslam put it Friday in Najaf: "We are trying to train them and equip them as best we can, but they just have AK-47s and they need some heavy machine guns and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), because that's what's out on the street."...
Doc-
The new CSIS report is pretty interesting, and shows that there is in fact a wide range of views within Iraq on how things are going. The social science is less than ideal, but the general picture emerges nevertheless.
Top report on this page:
http://www.csis.org/isp/pcr/
I remember that when we lifted the siege of Najaf and cut a deal with al-Sadr, after which he sent his forces home, some of the usual trolls were bragging about it. They also were explaining that Sadr was really a rather low-ranking Shi'a leader.
This had been true **before** the siege, but after al-Sadr was seen to have backed the US down, his prestige multiplied and he gained a lot of previously-unattached supporters. The people dispersed to their homes were assigned the task of disseminating Sadr's organization throughout the land.
A lot of the warbloggers and trolls don't even bother to think politically or militarily. They just want to see lots of shit blown up, and they hate liberals. And I really think that Rove and his political operation have had far more influence on strategic and military planning than they ever should have. Wolfowitz explaining things to the Armageddonists was an example.
No, I'm not kidding. Bush isn't that much different than his core constituency. He believes a lot of that stuff.
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson on August 7, 2004 10:38 PMWhile I generally share your dim view of many warbloggers, actually, Zizka, I believe Sadr may be a spent force at this point, outside of Sadr City anyway.
We'll see.
Posted by: praktike on August 7, 2004 10:44 PMPraktike, the questions about Sadr are how long will it take us to kill him, and how long will his lieutenants squabble before one takes the lead, and how effectively can his replacement function?
Sadr is the only shi'ite politician who has any international recognition, not counting american puppet exiles like Allawi. I don't know about the news inside iraq but I haven't heard that any other reputable shi'ite politician has name recognition across iraq.
As far as I know, he is the only iraqi politician that more than 50% of iraqis have heard of, except for Saddam and some IGC members. He is the only one who is known not to be a US collaborator -- except for Zarqawi who is not iraqi and does not represent iraqi interests.
He cannot be a spent force politically because he has no competition. Militarily, if he has 2 million people behind him he can lose a hundred a day for a long time. Without time to train them into an effective fighting force they can't win much, and with the americans using air strikes in iraqi cities including Najaf he can expect to lose 100 to our 1 each day. But we can't win until his people give up, and it makes us look bad and Allawi look bad when we kill them every day.
So the situation is probably stable until Sadr is martyred. We have been trying to kill him for more than 3 months solid and we haven't caught him yet. We will keep killing Sadrists and look worse and worse, and maybe we will capture and desecrate the shrines, and after Sadr dies the situation will change. Whoever can inherit his mantle and run for office will get a lot of votes.
Great, just what we need, another ARVN...
Posted by: jim in austin on August 8, 2004 08:10 AMActually, Ibrahim Jaffari of the al-Da'wa party is pretty popular. He's an Islamist who nevertheless has been working with the US.
Posted by: praktike on August 8, 2004 08:50 AMBTW, those Muslim cemeteries look like they were designed as defensive infantry emplacements, with big, sturdy masonry tombstones ever few feet.
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson on August 8, 2004 09:26 AMOn todays battlefield you don't want an address. If your address is Najef cemetery we have weapons with your address in their memorys. Also one thing learned in the American civil war - don't hide behind masonry. Hide behind a lot of dirt. Same lession learned in WW1. Hard stuff makes for great secondary missles. However, don't do any street fighting in big cemeteries with lots of big sturdy masonry tombstones unless you want to use lots of naplam.
Posted by: dilbert dogbert on August 8, 2004 04:32 PMThe latest Reuters story out of Iraq give a hint of al-Sadr's ability to influence the course of events in Iraq. "Pumping from the southern oilfields to storage tanks at Basra was stopped today after threats made by al-Sadr" (said an Iraqi oil official). "It will remain stopped until the threat is over." Basra has enough oil in storage to allow two days of normal exports, in the absence of new oil from pipelines.
Posted by: kharris on August 9, 2004 09:46 AM