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Biden Gets It Wrong

We are not simply "squeezing the water balloon."

2:30 PM, Apr 12, 2007 • By FREDERICK W. KAGAN
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* Muqtada al Sadr has fled to Iran, at great cost to his reputation in Iraq. He has always been anti-American, and has defined his movement from the start as a Shiite Iraqi nationalist movement aimed at ending the U.S. occupation. By mid-2004, his Jaysh al Mahdi was in open combat with U.S. soldiers and had set up machine guns in the most sacred Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, from which we had patiently and carefully to extricate his fighters following a long, slow battle. On April 9, 2007, Sadr called for peaceful protests against the U.S. occupation, and that's what he got. A few tens of thousands (perhaps) of protesters gathered in Najaf (many trucked there from Baghdad by Sadr's organization). They carried Iraqi flags rather than Sadr's picture--a marked departure from previous such demonstrations. No violence ensued, and there were few spontaneous protests around the country in response to this planned and prepared demonstration. As General Petraeus noted, moreover, the right to demonstrate peacefully is a new development in Iraqi society, the result of the invasion of 2003 and subsequent efforts to protect a nascent democracy. Lots of Iraqis don't like the American presence. Some of them, prompted by an Iraqi politician who's made his career based on anti-Americanism, demonstrated peacefully. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Biden's "intelligence experts" are also wrong that the Mahdi Army is simply lying low. Aggressive U.S. operations throughout Baghdad, including Sadr City, have capture or killed more than 700 Mahdi Army fighters, including many key figures. U.S. forces have swept repeatedly through Sadr-dominated neighborhoods in Baghdad, collecting weapons and intelligence and establishing a Joint Security Station in the middle of Sadr City. That's not lying low. It's losing--losing power, cohesion, and credibility. It's because he fears that he's losing control that Sadr called for demonstrations and has threatened to walk out of the government. The Sadrists have threatened to walk out on several occasions and have actually done it sometimes. Iraq ticked on without them and they came skulking back.