In the swirling violence that has now spread across the southern half of Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army gang of thugs is now using American-issued Iraqi Army humvees.
I wonder what surge proponents George W. Bush and John McCain will think of this:
With gunfire and explosions echoing round him, Lt Hamid Abbas of the Iraqi Army was letting no car pass unchallenged at his makeshift roadblock on the outskirts of a Basra slum.
His closest scrutiny, however, was reserved not for the few civilian motorists daring to venture on to the streets, but for other Iraqi army vehicles.
"Some of our soldiers have refused to fight the Mehdi Army and have instead handed their vehicles and weapons to them," he said, looking disgusted. "Now we are having to check every Iraqi army patrol that passes through to ensure they are genuine soldiers."
The scene on the other side of the battlefield proved his suspicions right. Dug in behind a wall was a squad of Mehdi Army fighters, the Shia militiamen Lt Abbas and 15,000 other Iraqi soldiers have been sent to quell.
Sure enough, one was driving an American-issue Iraqi army Humvee - one of seven, said the squad's leader, Haji Ali, handed to them by sympathisers within the Iraqi army.
It’s not a surprise, however, that Mahdi Army thugs are commandeering American-issued Iraqi Army vehicles; or that Iraqi police are switching sides in the middle of the fighting. At least not when you manage to get yourself into a fucked up situation like this:
In reality, the situation is considerably more complicated than this, but the graphic breaks down the basics. This is the state of affairs in which we’ve been entrenching ourselves for the last five years.
The U.S. military is now in an untenable predicament--where it is essentially trying to referee a civil war with multiple sides and factions. And most everyone involved is a bad guy. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the American military is designed to do. But that’s what you get when you have a government that has no idea how to properly utilize its own Armed Forces.
We now need to extract our forces from Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, so that we can instead focus on assisting Iraq politically and diplomatically so that it can find a better way to administer itself.
Author’s note: I just want to clarify that Muqtada al-Sadr does have a non-hostile relationship with groups inside Iran. He doesn’t hate Iran. However, his Mahdi Army is much less aligned with Iran than is his opponent Nouri al-Maliki—and Maliki’s backers—the ISCI and its armed wing, the Badr Brigade. But if I didn’t say "Hates," I’d have had to change the whole damn chart.
UPDATE: Muqtada al-Sadr has now ordered his followers to stand down. Again, this decision to seek a brokered solution rather than a military one is being made by an Iraqi (Sadr) and agreed to by another group of Iraqis (Maliki’s forces). Whether American troops remain in Iraq in large numbers has little to do with the outcome. As I said in November:
When al-Sadr lays down his arms, there will be relative peace. When he takes them up, Americans will die in dozens.
Regardless, the fortunes of Iraq will turn on Iraqi decisions made in Baghdad and Najaf, not in Washington, D.C. and the halls of Congress. As this situation shows, peace in Iraq lies in the hands of Iraqis. It cannot—and will not—be forced by Americans at the point of a gun.