WHY IS MOOKIE STILL ALIVE?

Why is the Moqtada al Sadr – nicknamed "Mookie" by our troops – still alive?

That this question can still be asked illustrates why things are going south for the U.S. in Iraq.
 
On Wednesday (10/25), Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General 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 held a news conference at which he denied 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 Shia death squad leader in Baghdad.

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

The 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 (the genuinely moderate) Shia cleric Ayatollah Abdul Majid al Khoei, who was gunned down by Mahdi army members in April, 2003.

"Mookie" al Sadr has the blood of dozens of Americans, and thousands of Iraqis, on his hands.  There is evidence he has been coordinating with al Qaeda. 

Yet al 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.

Victory depends less on sending more soldiers to Iraq than on permitting the ones who are there to kill our enemies.

In April of 2004, when we should have killed al Sadr, he was not a very popular figure among Iraq's Shia.  Now he's the most powerful figure in Iraq, eclipsing (the more or less moderate) Ayatollah Ali al Sistani.

"In Shia areas, the militias hold the real control of the city," wrote an Army sergeant in an intelligence unit in Baghdad in an email to the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.  "They have infiltrated, co-opted or intimidated into submission the local police.  They are expanding their territories, restricting freedom of movement for Sunnis, forcing mass migrations, spiking ethnic tensions…all the while U.S. forces do nothing."

Two years ago, the Sadr cancer could have been excised with relative ease. But it wasn't.  Now it has metastasized. Yet still we hesitate to apply the necessary treatment.

So why is the Moqtada al Sadr still alive?

When Coalition Provisional Authority chairman Paul Bremer issued an arrest warrant for al Sadr in April of 2004, we were dissuaded from serving it by Iraqi politicians and clerics who claimed they could "control" him.  Now he's controlling them.

Whenever we've attempted to apply a political "solution" to what is essentially a military problem, bad things have happened.  An example is when we broke off the first battle of Fallujah in May of 2004 at the insistence of those Sunni leaders (more or less) supporting the government.  This handed al Qaeda a major (though fortunately only a temporary) victory.

We hesitate to act decisively against al Sadr in order to preserve the facade of Iraqi democracy and sovereignty, even though Mr. Maliki's hapless government wouldn't last a week if U.S. troops withdrew.

To maintain this fiction, we won't take actions Mr. Maliki doesn't approve of.  But he depends upon the 28 votes al Sadr controls in the Iraqi parliament in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on power.  Prodding from the U.S. 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 al Sadr, there'll be an uprising we'll have to suppress.  It'll 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 email to Jim Taranto.

To act against al Sadr, we'll either have to brush aside Mr. Maliki's objections, or engineer his downfall.  It'll 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.

Mr. Bush says we can't afford to lose in Iraq.  I agree.  So when will he do what it takes to win?