[Mb-civic] [Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Iraq' s New Power Couple

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Iraq's New Power Couple

October 15, 2004
 By BARTLE BREESE BULL 



 

Baghdad 

Moktada al-Sadr's headquarters in Najaf is in a tiny alley
next to the city's famous shrine of the Imam Ali. As the
fighting between American forces and his Mahdi Army wound
down in August, I went there with two of his men, who
showed me a piece of paper bearing two seals: one belonged
to their boss, the other to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
the ultimate Shiite religious authority in Iraq. Below the
seals were the five promises of Mr. Sadr's cease-fire,
including his commitment to "participate actively in the
political process" and to "work cooperatively" toward
Iraq's January elections. 

At the time, many observers scoffed at the deal, citing Mr.
Sadr's previous broken promises and the failure of his men
to turn over their arms after the Najaf siege. Yet two
recent developments - one covered in the international
press, the other unnoticed - show that such skepticism may
have been misplaced. 

The first is Mr. Sadr's stated intention to form a
political party; the second is the behind-the-scenes
rejuvenation of Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile leader and
longtime favorite of the Pentagon who so notoriously split
with his American sponsors in May. Mr. Sadr's commitment is
for real, it represents momentous progress for the
democratic project in Iraq and it signals the emergence of
a broad and powerful Shiite front - with Ahmad Chalabi at
its center. 

The weapons handover in Sadr City, the huge Baghdad slum
named after Mr. Sadr's father, is just the latest promising
sign. Mr. Sadr's people told me in confidence after the
Najaf uprising about plans to start a political party for
the upcoming elections. They had planned to call their
political organization the Mahdi Party, in homage to a
12th-century imam whose return, Shiites believe, will bring
Iraq's majority group its era of justice. Now they have
gone public with their electoral plans and, in a sign of
growing political sophistication, they have chosen the more
accommodating name of the Patriotic Front. 

The Mahdi Army insurrections this summer in Najaf and Sadr
City had nothing to do with Mr. Sadr's thinking that he
could achieve military goals against American forces. If he
had wanted to derail the occupation, he would have done
what the Sunni insurgents do: keep his men out of harm's
way and focus his violence toward fellow Iraqis, foreign
civilians and government targets like power stations. 

Rather, he was moving to ensure his future role by seizing
political momentum among the Shiite demographic that
matters to him: the young urban poor. 

Similarly, it is not weariness and attrition that are now
making him lay down his weapons. It is easy to buy or make
more weapons in Iraq. And the ranks of his followers can be
as endlessly replenished as were those of the Vietcong. I
have spoken to members of every age group among them: the
21-year-olds with their black militia garb and
rocket-propelled grenades, the 15-year-olds melting holes
in the asphalt where the howitzer shells can be placed to
lie in wait for American vehicles, the wounded 6-year-olds
in hospital beds whose fathers brag that the little boys
will be fighting in five years' time. 

Mr. Sadr's new party and the older Shiite groups are likely
to form the basis for a unified list of candidates that
should capture at least 55 percent of the vote in January -
and possibly more if Kurdish and Sunni groups can be
brought into the fold. If this front includes all Shiite
factions, it will receive Ayatollah Sistani's approval. But
if it leaves out any important Shiite components -
including Mr. Sadr - the old man will remain silent. 

Thus Mr. Sadr's new direction, like his efforts in Najaf,
is not a military move but a political one. Just as most of
his country's violence consists of Iraqi attacks against
fellow Iraqis, the basic fact of Iraqi politics is not
opposition to the occupation, but maneuvering between
Iraqis in the game of sectarian and ethnic politics. 

Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi's resurgence is natural. While
American officials have been embarrassed by reports that he
convinced them of exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's
weapons, most Iraqis do not care if he hoodwinked
Washington. He is an Iraqi, and his loyalties and destiny
lie with his own country, not America. What does matter to
Iraqis is that if there is one man alive without whom
Saddam Hussein would still be in power, that man is Mr.
Chalabi. 

President Bush may lose his job over his Iraqi adventure.
The Kurds in their mountains may not really care whether
the rest of Iraq was liberated or not. The Sunnis may be
sorely missing the perks of Baathist rule. But Mr.
Chalabi's fellow Shiites have benefited greatly from the
removal of a regime that persecuted them brutally, and they
thank him for it. 

And many Shiites see that Mr. Chalabi, always the savviest
Iraqi politician, has continued to make the right moves
since the 2003 invasion. He has publicly fallen out with
Washington. The interim government under Ayad Allawi has
ransacked his house and issued a bizarre warrant accusing
him of counterfeiting Iraq's worthless old currency. When I
last saw Mr. Chalabi, he had just survived an ambush laid
by Sunni insurgents in which two of his guards were killed.


Saddam Hussein, Washington, Mr. Allawi and the Sunnis: Mr.
Chalabi has the right enemies, at least in the eyes of most
Shiites. As he said with a laugh when I mentioned his many
opponents to him, "That's not a bad thing." 

Equally important, he has the right friends. A member of a
leading family from Baghdad's secular Shiite merchant class
(Chalabi means "head merchant"), he is well connected and
working harder than ever behind the scenes. The ambush that
killed his bodyguards took place as he was returning to
Baghdad from a meeting in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah
Sistani. Mr. Chalabi told me has met with the paramount
spiritual leader "10 or 12 times" - far more than any other
politician can claim. He is also one of the few politicians
to have spent time with Mr. Sadr. And the rebel leader's
deputies have met a dozen times with Mr. Chalabi's
political organization. Not bad for a man given up as
politically dead just this summer. 

Mr. Chalabi has created two groups, the Shiite House and
the Shiite Political Council, which bring Iraq's various
Shiite political movements and parties together under a
loose umbrella. This is reminiscent of the Iraqi National
Congress that he ran from London during the last years of
Saddam Hussein. When we spoke last month, he had just
arranged for Ali Smesim, Mr. Sadr's top lieutenant, to
visit the Kurdish leadership at Sulaimaniya. Similar
delegations have been sent to various Sunni groups. 

While Washington may not be pleased to hear that militant
Sunnis are talking to Mahdi Army representatives, Mr.
Chalabi and Mr. Sadr may well help get American troops out
of the country. After five centuries under Sunni rule,
Iraq's Shiites majority will get its elections in January.
In the end, Mr. Sadr and the occupation have common cause
on the issue that matters most: a stable democratic
outcome. 

This shared goal is the basis for the accommodation that
can save the country: the Shiites plus the Kurds plus those
Sunnis who are not Baathists or religious extremists make
up about 90 percent of the country. And Mr. Chalabi, who in
the 1990's held together a coalition of secularists and
Islamists, Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, monarchists
and socialists, is uniquely suited to arranging an
electoral alliance among Iraq's Shiite factions. And as a
secular pragmatist, he is the Shiite most likely to
understand the need to assure Iraq's minority groups that
"democracy" is not simply shorthand for "tyranny of the
majority." 

Moktada al-Sadr has shown a knack for politics since he
emerged from the rubble of Saddam Hussein's fall. Now he
has shown a willingness to play Alexander to Ahmad
Chalabi's Aristotle, learning the game from the master. The
Americans, and the interim Iraqi government, would do well
to stop seeing these men as enemies and start working with
them on building a free Iraq. 

Bartle Breese Bull, who reported from Iraq for The
Financial Times, is writing a book on Harlem in the 1990's.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15bull.html?ex=1098862105&ei=1&en=5a4ca7f0608aa17b


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