Peace for Mesopotamia

Jeff Weintraub reads Juan Cole and wonders what Muqtada al-Sadr's game is:

Jeff Weintraub: What is Muqtada al-Sadr's game?: "Note that Muqtada puts the US on a par with radical [Sunni] Islamists and with Baathists as undeserving of forgiveness or reconciliation."  I've never been quite sure what game Muqtada al-Sadr thinks he's playing by taking positions like these, but whatever it is, it looks risky and potentially self-destructive....

I find that many Americans assume that if a full-scale sectarian civil war breaks out in Arab Iraq, the Shiites are bound to win and slaughter the Sunnis, since the Shiites are a majority and the Sunni Arabs amount to only 15-20% of the population. I suspect this assumption has something to do with a characteristically American illusion that majorities always beat--and often oppress--minorities, whereas often it's the other way around. As a number of people have pointed out, it seems pretty clear that the Ba'athists & jihadis at the core of the Sunni Arab "insurgency" are convinced that if they can detonate full-scale civil war and panic the Americans into running away, they can decapitate the Shiites politically, crush them, and take over the country. (See, for example, here and here and here.) This may or may not turn out to be a disastrous miscalculation on their part--I hope we don't find out--but from their perspective it's not self-evidently crazy.

Muqtada al-Sadr, like the Sunni Arab "insurgents" and their political allies, has been calling for US troops to clear out. But what does he expect to happen next? Does he figure that it's safe to make these noises because there's no danger of the US actually leaving. Or does think that, if it comes to a straight-out fight between his "Mahdi Army" militia and the Sunni Arab "insurgents," he can beat them. I suspect that he probably does believe that ... and I also suspect that he's wrong. If it does come to a full-scale sectarian explosion, it may be that the Sunni Arab "insurgents" will lose in the end.... But my guess is that before that happens, they will be able to rub out Muqtada al-Sadr without much trouble.

As I say, I hope we don't get the chance to find out.

I think it's simple.

If there is no large-scale civil war, then Muqtada al-Sadr is the nationalist-religious candidate--the only major politician from the Party of Ali who did not coquette and collaborate with the foreign-Christian American occupation. That has got to be worth a lot.

If there is a large-scale civil war, Iran enters on the side of the Party of Ali. The Sunnis today have as much chance of winning an Iraqi civil war as the Maronites had of winning the Lebanese civil war of a generation ago.