Everyone seems to be musing on why Maliki started this silly war against Sadr and why it was started now.
There is a theory that Cheney gave the order for this skirmish and another theory that this is all an Iranian plot. (See also Marc Lynch’s take from a Saudi paper and on other theories.) A third informed opinion argues that this is Maliki’s private dirty war to prevent elections in south Iraq.
The assumed motive in the first theory is that the anti-occupation stand of Sadr and his cooperation with nationalist Sunni forces are endangering the permanence of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. In the Iraqi parliament Sadr and Sunni nationalists could vote down any treaty that Cheney and Maliki would like to sign to achieve permanent U.S. backup for his or another puppets rule. Sadr has to be defeated before the end of the year when the UN mandate for U.S. troops runs out. Patrick Cockburn is going into that direction when he asserts that "the Americans must have agreed to the attack."
The Iranian plot theory comes with two different assumed Iranian motives. The first is that Iran ordered Maliki to attack because it wants to keep the U.S. in trouble and thereby prevent an attack on Iran. As Bill Lind layed out in Operation Cassandra a U.S. attack on Iran might well lead to a decisive defeat of the U.S. army in Iraq. With the U.S. army bogged down in Iraq, Iran has less to worry about. A second thought is that Iran would like to have a united southern Iraqi Shia state under Persian influence that over time could be assimilated into Iran. Sadr’s nationalist stance and his relative distance to Teheran would hinder that goal.
Billmon, in comments to a recent Lind piece, combines these two theories and muses:
It is just me and my paranoia, or has anyone else noticed that just as the Cheney Misadministration grapples with the question of whether to continue the troop drawdown in Iraq, suddenly all hell breaks loose between the âgoodâ Shia â i.e. our âalliesâ in the Maliki âgovernmentâ â and the âbadâ Shia in the Mahdi Army?
When I ran that observation by a friend, he immediately assumed I was accusing Team Cheney of stoking the boiler to keep the pressure on Bush/Rice and the troops in country. But I actually donât have any particular theory of the case â there are so many suspects.
But it does occur to me (repeatedly) that Iranian hardliners of various denominations have a strong, vested interest in keeping the US Army buried up to its neck in the Iraqi sand pit, thereby making a march to Tehran impossible (or at least, even more impossible) and providing lots of ripe targets and potential hostages if the cabal decides to roll the dice with an air campaign against the Iranian nuclear program.
In other words, not for the first time Iâm wondering: Are Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad essentially working the same side of the street?
Good question …
The third theory, laid out in detail by Fester, is supported by this bite from WaPo:
The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday …
Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can’t quite decipher" what is going on. It’s a question, he said, of "who’s got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.
The current government in Iraq was pressured by Cheney to finally agree to pass the law for provincial elections this fall. The Republicans needed the passing of the election law to show some success from the ‘surge’. But if the elections really would take place, Maliki’s Dawa and his allies from ISCI would likely lose out against Sadr’s followers.
Maliki therefore has to prevent the election. He started this civil war with an absurd small number of unreliable troops and no hope of winning against Sadr’s Hizbullah like defense strategy. He did so to, successfully, draw the U.S. into a renewed fight over the South, the U.S. troops main supply line, to create chaos that will not allow for an election to take place.
The U.S. is in a bind and Maliki can effectively start wars against this or that faction and always demand to be backed up by U.S. power. The U.S. is now in position where it must fight other peoples civil wars.
Maybe Maliki did believe the Dan Senor spin that Sadr is defeated and thought he really could take over Basra? I doubt it. Maliki now has to extend the ‘deadline’ he gave to Sadr to lay down arms by more than a week and thereby conceded the obvious defeat. But if the third theory is right and Maliki really started this to draw the U.S. into a renewed fight against Sadr, he has achieved his goal:
U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.
[UK] Maj Holloway said US warplanes had for the first time in the operation carried out bombing raids overnight in Basra, targeting "mortar teams" and "a concentration of militia troops".
Abu Muqawama sees a dangerous historic parallel:
In Lebanon, in September 1983, the U.S. lent direct support to what it assumed was a national institution, the Lebanese Army, in the battle at Souk el-Gharb. By doing so, it became, in the eyes of the rest of the Lebanese population, just another militia. The U.S. history in Iraq is more complicated, obviously, but what’s happening now is the U.S. is throwing our lot in with ISCI in the upcoming elections. And all Abu Muqawama is saying is, there better be a whole lot of quid pro quo going on as well.
Spencer Ackerman believes the unfolding chaos is an argument for the U.S. to stay longer, i.e. until a political solution is found. I disagree, the U.S. in Iraq is not the solution, but the source of the problem.
"If there were no Americans, there would be no fighting," said Abu Mustafa al-Thahabi, 38, a senior Mahdi Army member.
Whatever theory is right (I do lean to the third), from here on the war in Iraq will again become hotter.