Bad news for Mookie

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/04/iraqi_government_we.php

"We will continue until we secure Sadr City. We will not come out, we will not give up until the people of Sadr City have a normal life," Ali al Dabbagh, the spokesman for the government of Iraq, told AFP. "(Security forces) will do what they have to do to secure the area. I can't tell you how many days or how many months but they will not come out until they have secured Sadr City."

'The US military has stated it will support the Iraqi government in its plan to secure Sadr City. Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a spokesman for Multinational Forces Iraq, said the operations have intensified over the past week and US forces are backing the Iraqi military.'

Should there be any, my regular readers will have noted that for years now I have said that until all the militias are destroyed, nobody will be in control of Iraq; not the US nor the Iraqi government. It is becoming clear that the single biggest mistake in the direct aftermath of the US invasion was leaving a complete vacuum of governance and law and order in a nation that has only for brief periods been anything but a dictatorship. Militias grew up to 'protect' (in the mafia sense) the various ethnic/religious groups. Iraq was allowed to fragment, and putting humpty back together again has taken five years and many tens of thousands of dead Iraqis. We can say that this was because of US inexperience of being a colonial power, but it doesn't take away the terrible cost. But as Mr Maliki and millions of ordinary Iraqis know, there is simply no alternative to smashing the militias.

Anyone who knows the history of the mafia in the US knows how extaordinarily difficult it is, even in a rich, organised society, to get rid of underground militias once they've been established. From the mafia high point in the early 1920's, it took the FBI until the late 1980's to smash the big mafia families. Thousands of mafiosi died, and hundreds of FBI agents; hundreds of millions of dollars were spent. But they won in the end. The mafia in the US isn't gone, its just completely shredded and discredited. So here is our parallel- what took two or three years to gestate may take twenty or thirty to destroy. Still gotta do it. We may wish that the conditions had never been allowed for the militias to form, but they did.

It is a mark of the extreme remoteness and cushiness of America that so many American politicians can't distinguish between political parties and armed militia groups who say they are in politics. America doesn't have that problem. Most Americans can't imagine what it would be like if it existed. Iraqis can. And millions of them currently have to live in that nervous and fractured world where there are effectively two parties which demand their allegiance, and will punish harshly those who don't give it. But from what I've read over many months now, the vast majority of Iraqis want their government to come and remove the militia boot from their neck. There are hundreds of thousands of Shia in the Iraqi army fighting the JAM- co-religionists and often relatives of theirs. I bet they aren't happy, but what can they do.

Although often hazy, there still seems to be a much better understanding of the militia situation amongst US commentators than British ones. British journalists and commentators seem to think that Jaish Al-Mahdi, Badr Brigades and the other minor players are political groupings in the merry kaleidoscope of Iraqi politics. Mr Maliki via the Iraqi army is attacking his political enemies and causing a 'civil war'. They consider the Jaish Al-Mahdi to be 'extreme nationalists'. What no one on the left has bothered to explain is how a politician who until very recently they lambasted as being exemplary of the irretrievably sectarian nature of Iraqi government, and possibly even a stooge of Iran, is now a civil-war mongering stooge of the US. The truth is that for many many commentators on Iraq, the whole thing is just a bunch of names and groupings and discordant noise. Because they haven't tracked the story from the beginning, like some of us have, they don't have the detail of how the stories have changed and mutated over time.

The role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the marja (senior) shia cleric in Iraq is a good example. Up until September 2006, Sistani was heavily involved with trying to produce and maintain a Shia dominance of genuine constitutional national politics through all legal means. After that date, he retired from politics almost completely. Although he often still lets his views on matters become known, like his recent pronouncements on the JAM ceasefire and the fighting in Baghdad and Basra, his direct activities have stopped. There are innumerable other things which have affected the outcomes over the last five years, and for those with their finger on the pulse, many of them still come into play. Sadly, most of the MSM are outside that set. There is a sterility, a lack of grasp of the material facts and their context betrayed by every stupid headline and ludicrous prediction. I should have collated together all the rediculous stories about how Sadr 'won' in Basra to compare with the current crop of stories about how the JAM are being annihilated up and down southern Iraq.

Some day, somebody is going to start a really good news organisation and report all this shit properly.