General Petraeus' testimony yesterday was a linguistic maze of gobbledegook that said little and committed to less. Would that he and Ambassador Crocker could face the American people with a fingernail-sized sliver of the courage that his soldiers show in battle -- we and they deserve no less, although it was hardly in evidence. Nonetheless, politicians and press continue to quail before anyone in a brass hat: Coverage of the hearings was muted and the political response was more frustrated and resigned than anything else.
Petraeus and Crocker said that reconciliation in Iraq was "hard"; Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's award-winning Iraq correspondent, thinks it well nigh impossible. Yesterday, Cockburn -- whom one of his peers calls "quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today" -- published Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, an assessment of the Shiite cleric and political power. Departing from traditional Western reporting, Cockburn view Muqtada as a canny, skilled leader who owes his position to his family's long-time opposition to Saddam Hussein and his ready grasp of Iraqi opposition to occupation of any kind.
Sadr's power grew after the occupation began, when American leadership proved unable to provide food, water, and electricity to the people of Baghdad. Moreover, the Iraqi provisional government, hunkered down in the relative safety of the Green Zone, "rapidly turned into a kleptocracy comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed the loathing with which the government was regarded, and dodged in and out of government, enjoying some of the fruits of power while denouncing those who held it."
In the last chapter of his book -- read it here -- Cockburn describes how the best chance of Shia and Sunni alliance collapsed when the Sunnis reject Sadr's calls for unity by refusing to denounce Al-Qaeda in Iraq, an organization hated and feared by the Shia community. Unwilling or unable to accept their minority status, the Sunnis began their protracted guerilla war with the Shia factions. Ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods ensued and the fissure between the two groups became unbridgeable. Cockburn observes that "the only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he called for unity, would be for them to be taken back voluntarily into the areas in Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been driven. But there is no sign of this happening. The disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for the country to exist as anything more than a loose federation."
Cockburn describes Moqtada, whose hold on the Shia militias is hardly absolute, as "a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over, sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led." Which begs the question: If as influential and capable a man as Moqtada al-Sadr is riding an Iraqi tiger that he can't control, what are we doing? I circle back to the galling Petraeus-Crocker testimony and wonder why no one asks this: What about the situation in Iraq and the Administration's performance to date leads anyone to believe that the United States can dictate as positive outcome in that tragic country? Or, for that matter, play any constructive role at all, given who is in charge?