Informed Speculation

Although I know it won’t sit well with our friend mtl, the anti-Sadr bandwagon is growing.  Here’s Jack Kelly:

That this question can still be asked illustrates why things are going south for the United States in Iraq:

Why is Moqtada al-Sadr still alive?

On Wednesday, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, held a news conference. That afternoon, so did President Bush. At both, the U.S. officials announced the Iraqi government has agreed to a series of “benchmarks” for progress in Iraq, and a timetable for accomplishing them. Chief among them is disarming the sectarian militias that currently are responsible for most of the bloodshed.

Later that afternoon, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki denied that he’d agreed to benchmarks, declared he wouldn’t be bound by any timetable and denounced the attempted arrest earlier in the day of a Shiite death squad leader in Baghdad (although he and Mr. Khalilzad issued a statement yesterday claiming they had resolved their differences.)

The death squad leader is a big shot in Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi army, which last weekend attacked Iraqi police in the southern cities of Amarah and Suwayra.

Moqtada al-Sadr is a creature of Iran, which funds his militia. Twice before (in April and August of 2004) he ordered uprisings against U.S. troops. At the time, there was a warrant out for his arrest for the murder of moderate Shiite cleric Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who was gunned down by Mahdi army members in April, 2003.

Mr. Sadr has the blood of dozens of Americans and thousands of Iraqis on his hands. There is evidence he has been coordinating with al-Qaida.

Yet Mr. Sadr is not dead. He is not in prison. He is in the government. And people wonder why U.S. policy in Iraq is failing.

As I have said previously, I find a targeted assassination to be a bridge too far; I think it would cause more problems than it would solve.  Still, he must be confronted,  We must continue to bring all pressure to bear on Maliki to divorce himself from association with this man.  His government may well fall without the support of Sadr, but we cannot be impartial witnesses to mass murder.

If the Iraqi government won’t take on the militias, the U.S. military must…or you can count me among those calling for a withdrawal.  There’s no sense keeping our mlitary engaged in a battle with one hand tied behind its back; if we learned anything from Vietnam, it should have been that.

As Kelly writes in his conclusion:

[Maliki] depends upon the 28 votes Mr. Sadr controls in the Iraqi parliament in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on power. Prodding from the United States has so far been insufficient to get him to give them up. Mr. Maliki has declared which side he’s on, and it isn’t ours.

If we act against Mr. Sadr, there will be an uprising. It will be bloody. But continued inaction pretty much guarantees slow motion defeat.

“If we continue on as is in Iraq, we will leave here (sooner or later) with a fractured state, a Rwanda-waiting-to-happen,” wrote the Army intel sergeant in his e-mail to Jim Taranto.

To act against Mr. Sadr, we’ll either have to brush aside Mr. Maliki’s objections, or engineer his downfall. It will be embarrassing for President Bush to admit the failure of the Iraqi government, and he’ll be accused of acting imperiously. But better Mr. Bush eat some crow than that American soldiers eat more lead.

I couldn’t agree more…