Who is Moqtada al-Sadr?
He is a Shia Islamist cleric who inherited a political movement from his father, Muhammed Sadiq al-Sadr, an Ayatollah who, along with Moqtada’s brother, was assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s agents in 1999.
He, in turn, had been the political heir of his brother, Ayatollah Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr, a major ideologist for the relatively soft-Islamist Dawa Party who was killed by Saddam in 1980.
Moqtada is a "harder" Islamist than the earlier Sadrs. He favours direct rule by the clergy on the model of Iran.
The Mahdi Army has enforced dress codes, closed shops selling alcohol, prevented the showing of western films, terrorised prostitutes, murdered gay people. In March 2004, the Mahdi Army invaded the Gypsy township of Qawliyya with bulldozers. Complaining of "moral violations", they literally levelled the township. In the slow civil war in Baghdad since February 2006, the Mahdi Army has been the main group forcing Sunnis out of one previously-mixed district after another.
Sadr's movement has the basic characteristics of clerical fascism. It has also maintained a more populist and Iraqi-nationalist rhetoric than the main "government" Shia Islamists, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution (formed in Iran in 1982 as a split from Daawa).
Despite its programme for rule by (Shia) clergy, it talks of Sunni-Shia unity. It has opposed the new oil law.
Its main base is among young men in the huge Shia district of Baghdad called (after Moqtada's father) Sadr City. Unlike the more southern-based Shia Islamists, it has opposed regionalism in Iraq (i.e. more or most oil revenues going to the oilfield regions of the Shia south and the Kurdish north). It tends to be hostile to Kurdish demands.
Yet it has a real popular base, partly because of its ability to deliver civil administration in Sadr City. According to a New York Times reporter (9 February 2007): "Schools are packed with children [in many areas of Iraq they are now deserted]... the economy has come alive... Pyramids of fruit at the bustling market, near a park with new red fences... new children’s bicycles with tassels on the handlebars... computer shops".
What does the Sadr movement want?
It presents itself as an Iraqi nationalist movement, demanding that Iraq be freed from American occupation, and willing to unite with Sunnis to achieve that.
Its actions suggest, however, that its operational perspective is to be the radical populist wing of the Shia-Islamist alliance. It wants to help build up a Shia-dominated government under American protection, but to keep its distance from the Americans while doing so.
In April 2004, when by all accounts Sadr had less support than he has now, the US chose to pick a fight with him, closing down a Sadrist paper and declaring it wanted to arrest Sadr. After two months' fighting there was a truce. Sadr emerged much stronger.
The Sadrists joined the United Iraqi Alliance of SCIRI and Daawa for the December 2005 elections; were a key force in winning the prime ministership for Maliki against other candidates; and had six ministers.
Under US pressure, Maliki said last month that he would sack five of his Sadrist ministers. The Sadrist ministers resigned on 16 April, presumably jumping before they were pushed.
One Sadrist leader said: "We are handing Mr Maliki a yellow card. He made a bad foul. But for us the game is not over". The Sadrists had already withdrawn from parliament in December and January. This time they will stay in parliament.
The Sadrists' stated reason for resigning is that, asked on a visit to Japan about a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, Maliki had replied that it was not yet possible. "We are against the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq", cautioned a Sadrist leader, "because right now the country just can't afford it. But we are 100% for a realistic and objective timetable for withdrawal".
The "timetable for withdrawal" is not new. People who shy away from immediate destabilisation, and have no programme for making things better, float hope or promises things will somehow become better after a "timetable". The first "timetable" was the UN one whereby the Americans would withdraw in December 2005. In early 2005, the US promised large troop reductions by early 2006.
In mid-November 2005, at a conference in Cairo convened by the Arab League, representatives from both the Shia/Kurdish Transitional Government and the Sunni-supremacist “resistance” demanded a timetable for US withdrawal and upholding the legitimacy of “resistance” attacks on US forces. According to the Beirut paper Al Hayat, a target date for US withdrawal - November 2007 - was suggested in Cairo by no less than Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq.
Will the US pull out?
Not in the near future. The current supposedly anti-war stance of the Democrats in the US congress amounts to giving Bush $100 billion now to pursue his "surge" in return for a promise to withdraw partially in the conveniently unforeseeable future of August 2008.
Though the US troops cannot offer the country any sort of positive orderly administration, they do have the firepower to go anywhere and defeat any militia that chooses to fight them. They thus provide a sort of skeleton for Iraq as a political unit.
Without them, the Iraqi government would collapse. Each militia would seize as much as it could for its own "mini-Taliban" rule. The militias' allies in neihgbouring countries, like Iran, would help them, maybe invading. Turkey is already threatening to invade Kurdish northern Iraq.
For the peoples of Iraq it would be devastating. For the US - for different reasons - the collapse of oil-rich Iraq, in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East, would be horrifying.
On the other hand, even the most "hawkish" Republican candidate for the presidency, John McCain, says that Bush's "surge" has to show positive results "within months". He admits that "if the Bush administration's plan had not produced visible signs of progress by the time a McCain presidency began, he might be forced... to end American involvement in Iraq. 'I do believe that history shows us Americans will not continue to support an overseas engagement involving the loss of American lives for an unlimited period unless they see some success'." (New York Times, 15 April).
The US occupation is no bulwark against the worst outcomes. It may even eventually make the "worst" outcomes even worse, by the way it exacerbates social collapse, sectarian embitterment, and militarisation.
Will the Maliki government fall?
Almost certainly the Sadrists do not want it to fall. The most-canvassed alternative is a return to power of Iyad Allawi, who was the US-appointed leader of the "Transitional Government" in 2004-5.
According to the Sunday Times, those sections of the Sunni "resistance" willing to talk to the US, in negotiations in early 2006, demanded a government headed by Allawi. The negotiations broke down when Maliki became prime minister.
Allawi is a thug, a former Ba'thist and a former close co-worker of the CIA. He is trying to put together an anti-Maliki majority in the Iraqi parliament in order to create (he says) a non-sectarian government. He has got some Sunni groups. A Shia-Islamist group strong in Basra, Fadhila, left the main Shia alliance last month to join Allawi. If he can get the Kurds to break with Maliki, he might just do it.
Allawi's programme is: two years of martial law, and Arab troops brought into Iraq. Effectively, he wants a military dictatorship headed by himself.
A recent opinion poll in Iraq showed only 22% wanting "an Islamic state", while 34% wanted "dictatorship" and 43% "democracy".
It is not clear whether the US backs Allawi's bid. It is even less clear whether such an Allawi government could possibly survive. The army and the police through which he would want to rule are heavily permeated by the Shia-Islamist parties - SCIRI, Daawa, Sadrists - whom he would try to sideline.
Maybe the jostling between Maliki, Sadr, Allawi and the US will lead to a total political collapse, the impossibility of any government, and a vast surge of Shia discontent. If the leader-behind-the-scenes of the main Shia-Islamist parties, Ayatollah Sistani, is pushed into demanding that the Americans quit, then their position will become impossible.
Why is Iraqi politics so sectarian?
It is not because the people of Iraq are all crazed by religion. It is because Iraqi society has been pulverised by one blow after another for 40-odd years now.
In 1958-63 there was a brief flowering of relatively open political and labour-movement activity. A Ba'thist coup in 1963 crushed that. In the course of the 1970s the Ba'thist regime hardened into totalitarianism. It became a "republic of fear" during the war with Iran which Saddam Hussein started in 1980.
That war continued until 1988. In 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait. A US-led coalition pushed him out, slaughtering huge numbers of Iraqi conscripts. The Shia of Iraq's south, and the Kurds of the north, then rose up against Saddam. The Americans, worried that Iraq would break up (as it may well break up now), stood by while Saddam repressed the rebellion.
The Kurds won some de facto autonomy, but the south was crushed and punished. On top of Saddam's punishment, they had the punishment of twelve years of UN sanctions.
In 2003, the invading Americans recklessly destroyed all the structures of administration in Iraq. People turned to the mosques as the only refuge in the chaos.
Division between Sunni and Shia in Iraq goes back a long way. For centuries the area has had a Shia majority but has been ruled by Sunnis - under the Ottoman Empire, under the British-created monarchy, and under the Ba'thists.
According to Hanna Batatu’s huge study, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, in the early 20th century: “Islam in Iraq was more a force of division than of integration. It split deeply Shii and Sunni Arabs. Socially they seldom mixed, and as a rule did not intermarry. In mixed cities they lived in separate quarters... To the strict Shiis, the government... of the Ottoman sultan that led Sunni Islam was in its essence a usurpation... They were... estranged from it, few caring to serve it or to attend its schools...”.
After World War Two intermarriage became quite common. Many Shia moved to Baghdad. Secularism advanced. Probably in 2003 there was a clear majority of Iraqis who wanted to avoid Sunni-Shia division.
But such things are not decided by majority vote, least of all in conditions of social chaos and the collapse of civil administration. Sunni-sectarian armed groups, often led by former Ba'thist officers, became active very early: in August 2003 they carried out a car bombing in Najaf killing 120 people and the main leader of SCIRI.
The Shia-Islamist groups advanced by more gradual means, but also arms in hand, to claim their majority rights. The population polarised, and in conditions of escalating social disintegration, continues to polarise.
Isn't partition the answer, as suggested in Peter Galbraith's new book?
No, if only because of Baghdad. The city has over seven million of Iraq's 27 million people. In any hypothetical partition into a Shia south, Sunni centre, and Kurdish north, Baghdad constitutes the majority of the centre's population.
Yet Baghdad is not a Sunni city. It may have a Shia majority, and in any case is the biggest Shia city in Iraq. There is no way that the Shia would hand it over to a Sunni statelet.
For the Sunni Arabs, even a "central" statelet including Baghdad would be something to fight against to the death. It would be oil-less, land-locked, helpless. A "central" statelet without Baghdad would be even worse.
Moreover, Iraqi Arab nationalism is deep-rooted among both Sunni and Shia. Many people are simultaneously both ardent Iraqi nationalists and ardent Sunni or Shia sectarians.
Partition would come, if ever, only at the end of apocalyptic battle. Not through agreement, and not even through the sort of civil war which, though bloody, moves people on from otherwise insoluble conflict to at least a workable resolution.
What should socialists propose?
It would be a hopeless and self-defeating endeavour for socialists to try to calculate which is the slightly-less-bad path of deterioration and endorse that.
To extract from our necessary hostility to the US/UK occupation a spurious "immediate answer" - "troops out now" - would be demagogic. Yes, we want the troops out, but not at the price of a triumphant rampage by the sectarian militias. It would be wrong to gloss over that by taking refuge in a negative slogan ("troops out now") and claiming that its positive meaning is not the obvious public one but a private interpretation (and, unfortunately, something not "now" available), the victory of the Iraqi workers against both US/UK and the sectarian militias.
As Leon Trotsky put it, we should "never play with slogans that are not revolutionary by their own content but can play a quite different role according to the political conjuncture, the relationship of forces, etc..."
Our programme is for the Iraqi labour movement, with support from the international labour movement, to take the lead in the fight for democracy, secularism, and self-determination for the peoples of Iraq, against both the US/UK forces and the sectarian militias.
The odds stacked against that perspective are huge, and becoming larger. But to give up on it would be to give up on the Iraqi working class and the people of Iraq.
