April 12, 2004
BREMER BIFFED:
Some say U.S. miscalculated in recent Iraq moves (Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid, 4/12/04, The Washington Post)
"Bremer follows in the footsteps of Saddam," screamed the headline in al-Hawza, a tabloid newspaper run by firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. With incendiary language, the article accused L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, of deliberately starving the Iraqi people.A month later, on March 28, Bremer ordered the weekly paper shut down. According to U.S. officials, he thought that after months of waiting, the moment was right to pressure al-Sadr to capitulate to American demands to disband his growing militia, which had attacked American troops in the past.
But instead of relenting, al-Sadr and his supporters responded with protests, the seizure of government buildings and a spate of violent attacks, unleashing a major revolt in Shiite-dominated parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq that has become the gravest challenge to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Several U.S. and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer's move to close the newspaper as a profound miscalculation. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with al-Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.
"We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell but had no immediate plan to disable him, so of course he struck back in a very vicious way," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has been serving as a senior adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Baghdad.
"Al-Sadr basically implemented plans he had all along to launch a revolutionary campaign to seize power. The mistake we made tactically was in not moving swiftly and all at once against every aspect of his operation."
Bremer also chose to pursue al-Sadr at the same time tensions were boiling over in Fallujah, a Sunni-dominated city west of the capital. Two days before the newspaper closure, U.S. Marines had killed 15 Iraqis during a raid there, accelerating a cycle of violence that intensified later that week, when a mob murdered four American security contractors and mutilated at least two of the bodies.
Closing the paper does seem pretty pointless if done in isolation, rather than simultaneously with the arrest of al-Sadr. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 12:44 PM
Cycle of violence. Good gawd, that phrase should be banned from journalism.
Posted by: kevin whited at April 12, 2004 1:44 PMSadly, in these days of 24/7/365 news coverage, the moral high ground almost always goes to the side that has the most compelling tragedy video. Closing the paper and shutting down Al-Sadr's operation at the same time would have been the smart thing to do, but from an image standpoint the action would have existed in a vacuum to onlookers both inside Iraq and in the U.S. (old Europe would slam us either way, but they're irrelevant to this incident).
Shutting Al-Sadr down following the attacks on the Marines, which in turn came after the deaths in Fallujah, created a cause and effect situation that the public could easily grasp. Of course, Bush's opponents immediately yelled "quagmire" but if the U.S. had acted earlier, they would have been shouting "repression" and turning the chunky cleric into a combination of John Peter Zenger and Mahatma Ghandi (which if you'll recall, some people were already trying to do when the reports of Al-Sadr's newspaper being shut down first came out, minus any context on what it was printing and why it was closed).
Posted by: John at April 12, 2004 2:42 PM