What
Does Muqtada Al-Sadr Want?
By Juan Cole
20 August, 2004
Juancole.com
The
Associated Press expresses confusion, both its own, and that
of US government officials, about what Muqtada al-Sadr's goals are.
I don't understand
this confusion. Muqtada has given many sermons and interviews in the
past 16 months outlining his goals exactly.
1) He wants the
US troops out of the country immediately, which is to say, an end to
Occuption. If there have to be foreign troops in Iraq, he wants them
under a United Nations command.
2) He refuses to
cooperate (he would say "collaborate") with the caretaker
government of Iyad Allawi, which he sees as a puppet regime installed
by the United States. He insists that no legitimate Iraqi governmental
process can begin until the US is out.
3) He wants the
reestablishment of a strong central Iraqi government with a strong military,
but which has cut all ties with the Baathist past.
4) He wants Iraq
to stay together rather than being partitioned, and has denounced Kurdish
demands for loose federalism.
5) He wants Iraqi
Shiism to emerge from Iran's shadow and to establish its independence
from Iran. His movement is rooted in the Shiite ghettos of Iraq and
is very indigenous. He is not Iran's catspaw in Iraq, quite the opposite.
He is strong Iraqi nationalist.
6) He sometimes
talks about "democracy" in post-American Iraq, but probably
just means populism. Like Peron and Franco, his populism implies his
ability to maintain and direct his own militia, who provide "order"
(read puritanical morality imposed by force) to Shiite neighborhoods.
7) In the long term,
he would like to see a system in Iraq similar to the regime in Iran.
He wants Islamic law to be the law of the land, and he wants clerics
to rule. His father studied with Ayatollah Khomeini and accepted the
notion of clerical rule. So does Muqtada. That is, there may be a place
for elections (as in Iran), but true power would rest in the hands of
the clerics. He has admitted all this in Arabic press interviews.
So, I don't understand
the widespread puzzlement reported by AP. It may not be a simple set
of positions, but they aren't hidden from view or hard to understand.
There were several
loud explosions Thursday morning near the Shrine of Ali where Muqtada
is holed up with about 1000 men.
Although Muqtada
agreed Wednesday to disarm his militia and leave the shrine if US troops
would withdraw from the city first, few expect this siege to end well
or easily. The wire services do not appear to have caught on that Muqtada
is demanding the withdrawal of US troops as a necessary precondition,
but that is what is being reported by al-Jazeerah.
Interim Defense
Minister Hazem Shaalan threatened to teach Muqtada a lesson he would
never forget, and promised decisive action against him, if he did not
leave the shrine within hours. (-al-Zaman ). (Shaalan has adopted the
body language and rhetoric of the old Baath regime, which makes the
skin of a lot of Iraqis crawl. To be fair, Muqtada also acts in a thuggish
way that alarms many Iraqis who have had enough of thugs.)
Juan Cole is Professor
of History at the University of Michigan.
Copyright: Juan
Cole.