AN EASILY RESOLVED DILEMMA THOUGH:

Muqtada's Got a Posse: a review of Patrick Cockburn's new book, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq (Matthew Duss, May 30, 2008, American Prospect)

Muqtada represents the Iraq we found, which was not what had been expected. Rather than work with that Iraq, the U.S. has continually tried to reshape reality to its liking. From the beginning, the U.S. occupation consistently treated Sadr's movement as a problem to be solved, rather than a genuine constituency to be accommodated, as demonstrated by Paul Bremer's shocking declaration, as recounted by Ali Allawi, that Bremer "didn't care a damn about the underclass and what they [the Sadrists] represented!" It was the inability and unwillingness of U.S. policymakers to deal with this Iraq, rather than the Iraq of neoconservative hallucination, that fed the chaos and led to the years of staggering violence and humanitarian catastrophe which have scarred a generation of Iraqis.

Muqtada and the continued persistence of his movement can be seen as the definitive refutation of Bush's Iraq policy, which held that a new, secular democratic Iraq could serve as a U.S. ally in the war on terror and a bulwark against Iran. "Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq, which it has never resolved," Cockburn summarizes.

True, but odd, because Mookie's insistence on ending the Occupation and Iraqi self-determination jibes precisely with Anglo-American values. But it's quite wrong that we've treated him as a problem all along--he's been treated like part of the solution since he helped lay the pre-conditions of the surge and especially since he called, and observed, a truce.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 30, 2008 4:03 PM