United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

The report on Tuesday that, as the Times of London put it, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army "will voluntarily disband if Shia scholars advise its leader to do so," delighted much of the mainstream media in the West, but was of little significance. -- "Aides to Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr said that he would send delegations to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a moderate religious leader in Najaf, and to senior clerics in Iran to consult on whether he should stand down his 60,000-strong al-Mahdi Army," James Hider reported.[1] -- The development was called "typically ambiguous" by Abigail Hauslohner of Time, who pointed out that "Sistani has previously declined to be drawn on the matter of Sadr's militia, and a Sadr spokesman said Monday that the religious authorities in Najaf had, in fact, 'refused' to order him to close down the Mahdi Army."[2] -- Prof. Juan Cole of the Univ. of Michigan mocked the "unrealistic optimism and foolish gullibility that marks political discourse on the Right" (see here for another fine example] that was on display in James Hider's piece: "[T]he idea that, having lost militarily, al-Maliki and his political allies (who are a minority in parliament now) could just a couple of days later jawbone Moqtada into giving up his paramilitary was always absurd."[3] -- For a more reliable take on how Moqtada al-Sadr stands in Iraq, see the final chapter of Patrick Cockburn's new book, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, which was published this week.[4] -- Cockburn's conclusion: "One of the gravest errors in Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Moqtada and his movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning, the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater. -- In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play a central role." ...

BAGHDAD -- Iraq’s largest and most dangerous militia will voluntarily disband if Shia scholars advise its leader to do so, officials said yesterday -- a dramatic move that could quell much of the fighting in the war-torn country.

Aides to Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr said that he would send delegations to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a moderate religious leader in Najaf, and to senior clerics in Iran to consult on whether he should stand down his 60,000-strong al-Mahdi Army.

The sudden announcement -- the first time that the rebellious cleric had offered to disband his forces -- came as U.S. and Iraqi troops were poised for a key offensive into his Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City.

Yesterday streams of refugees were pouring out of Sadr City as automatic gunfire and mortar bomb blasts ripped through the giant slum that is home to 2.5 million people. Terrified residents scuttled down side streets as tanks trundled along the main thoroughfares, shooting at guerrillas. A massive American and Iraqi security presence had ringed the area, with police and soldiers guarding every exit with many predicting a final, bloody showdown as popular support drained from al-Mahdi Army.

The position of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, whose fighters fought government forces to a standstill in Basra, was looking precarious. His former erstwhile ally Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister who personally led the Basra crackdown, saw his standing bolstered by his tough approach to the militias.

Despite the inconclusive results of his Basra offensive, Mr. al-Maliki has refused to back down and this weekend stitched together a rare consensus of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias to back a law banning from future elections any party that maintains a militia.

That united stance has put the Sadrists on the back foot, and support for the militia was waning even in Sadr City itself as official forces pushed ever deeper into al-Mahdi Army territory.

Ali Nema, a 45-year-old bureaucrat, was pushing his elderly parents and young children out of Sadr City on a wooden market barrow as gunfire rattled a few streets away. “I had to get them out now because almost the whole of my sector has left, more than 80 per cent of the houses are empty now. The Americans are attacking, the Mahdi Army mortars are falling, and the Iraqi Army are fighting too,” he said.

Zainab Amer, a student, was stuck in her house for two weeks, too afraid to leave. She fled yesterday after a mortar bomb killed four neighbors. Before she left, four militiamen were shot dead in her street fighting the U.S. Army. “I saw one of them having his hand blown off right in front of our door. It was a horrible sight,” she said. “Everyone is fighting everyone else.”

An Iraqi police commander whose forces have sealed the eastern approaches to Sadr City said that raids would resume today when a government deadline for the militia to disarm expires. “I think this time they’re finished,” said Brigadier Ali Ibrahim Daboun. “In all the previous battles, they were attacking and we were on the defensive. Now it’s the other way round.”

Even as General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker made their case on Capitol Hill for maintaining U.S. troop levels in Iraq, a key Iraqi advocate of sending them home was making a power play. Tensions had been high in Baghdad Tuesday morning, in anticipation of a million-strong march against the U.S. occupation called by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. His Mahdi Army had been engaged in weeks of violent clashes with U.S. and Iraqi government forces in the capital and in the southern city of Basra, and many in the capital feared the worst. But on Tuesday afternoon, Sadr suddenly called off the demonstration, declaring in a statement, "I'm calling on the beloved Iraqi people who are willing to demonstrate against the occupation to postpone this demonstration out of my fear for them and my concern for more bloodshed."

Sadr's announcement came just as cars ferrying worried Iraqis began to clog Baghdad's streets, amid tightened security checkpoints and swirling rumors of an impending curfew. But whether this recent call for restraint will actually ensure calm remains uncertain -- Sadr also threatened to call off the Mahdi Army's now defunct cease-fire if attacks by government forces continued. And his response to a demand by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he disband his militia or face exclusion from the political process was typically ambiguous: Sadr said he would put the matter to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, and disband his army if Sistani, the most powerful Shi'ite religious authority in Iraq, ordered him to do so. That may simply have been a maneuver for sympathy on the Shi'ite street; Sistani has previously declined to be drawn on the matter of Sadr's militia, and a Sadr spokesman said Monday that the religious authorities in Najaf had, in fact, "refused" to order him to close down the Mahdi Army.

Despite the cautiously optimistic assessments offered by Petraeus and Crocker, many Iraqis remain pessimistic about the weeks and months ahead. The country is still reeling from the fresh wave of violence brought on by Maliki's disastrous military offensive against Sadr's militia that began in Basra two weeks ago. On Tuesday, Sadr City -- the sprawling Baghdad Shi'ite slum that is the capital's largest neighborhood and a stronghold of the Mahdi Army -- remained locked down as fighting continued between militia fighters and Iraqi and American forces. Politicians from a number of parties warned of an impending humanitarian crisis.

"Sadr City is suffering," said Fadhila party MP Bassam Sheriff. "There needs to be a humanitarian dimension to this."

Prime Minister al-Maliki escalated his offensive against the Sadrists on Sunday by warning that they would be barred from participating in October's nationwide local elections if they did not disband the Mahdi Army. Although much of the government backed Maliki's statement, even his allies acknowledged it would be an uphill battle. "Let's be realistic, Maliki's main goal is to wipe out the Sadrists before elections because he knows his bloc will lose to them," Alia Nasayif Jasim, a legislator from the secular Iraqi National Accord party, told TIME. "It is impossible to wipe out the Sadrists. If the government is serious, it should dissolve all militias including those linked to the government. If it goes after all the militias equally, the Sadrists will agree to disband."

Some of Sadr's supporters are smug in the face of the Prime Minister's warning. "Maliki couldn't even stop the renewal of the Blackwater contract. How could he disband all the militias?" Fawze Akram, an MP from the Sadrist block, told TIME.

The electoral threat posed by the Sadr movement to the main Shi'ite parties in the current government -- the Islamic Supreme Council, and Maliki's own Dawa Party -- raises the political incentive for the government to take on the Sadrists before October's vote. But the consequences of the confrontation threaten Iraq's stability. "It is possible that the religious authorities could contain this crisis," said Kurdish MP Bukhari Abdallah Khudur. "If they don't, it will only get worse as elections approach."

Indeed, the Sadrists see themselves as fighting in self-defense, rather than as the aggressor. Or, as Sadrist MP Akram put it, "for every action, there is a reaction."

Sadr himself, who maintains that the United States is the chief enemy, warned in his Tuesday statement, "If the national benefit requires us to unfreeze our army to achieve our goals, we will do so." And with the increasing incursions of Iraqi and American forces into Sadr City and other Mahdi Army strongholds, the cleric will be under growing pressure to act on that warning.

I am always astounded at the combination of unrealistic optimism and foolish gullibility that marks political discourse on the Right in Washington. We were being told by Rich Lowry at the National Review that Sadr was on the ropes and on the verge of disbanding the Mahdi Army because the other political factions had turned on him, and that the others had had their militias join the regular security forces.

So let us get this straight. Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought off thousands of regular Iraqi army troops in Basra and Baghdad, and perhaps thousands of those troops deserted rather than fight. So the Mahdi Army won big and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki lost. Also the U.S. military trainers of the Iraqi troops lost face.

So the next thing we hear is that al-Maliki is talking big and demanding that the Mahdi Army be dissolved. Usually you get to talk big if you win the military battle, not if you lose.

The Sadrists have no intention of dissolving the Mahdi Army, according to this Arabic source, quoting Sadrist spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi. They point out, pace that great Iraq expert Lowry, that there are 28 militias in Iraq. The Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) still exists as a stand-alone organization. In fact, it ran as a political party in the elections and holds both provincial and federal seats. It hasn't been completely merged into the state security forces, as Lowry alleged. And anyway, painting a sign on a militia saying 'this one is legitimate because its party won the last election' is not going to convince any real Iraqis.

As it happens, the parliamentary representatives of Mosul demanded Monday that the Kurdish Peshmerga be dissolved. (Hint: Hell will freeze over first).

Then the U.S. press went wild for this supposed report that Muqtada al-Sadr said he would dissolve his militia if Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani ordered it. Folks, he always says that when there is a controversy. (He said the same thing in spring, 2004.) He says it because he knows it makes him look reasonable to the Shiite public. He says it because he knows that the grand ayatollahs are not going to touch the matter with a ten-foot pole. They are not so foolish as to take responsibility for dissolving a militia that they had nothing to do with creating. And that is probably the real meaning of this CNN report that they 'refused' when asked. I doubt the grand ayatollahs in Najaf actively commanded Muqtada to keep his militia. They just declined to get drawn in.

So the idea that, having lost militarily, al-Maliki and his political allies (who are a minority in parliament now) could just a couple of days later jawbone Moqtada into giving up his paramilitary was always absurd.

As for the the threat that the Sadrists would not be allowed to run in the provincial elections in the fall unless the Mahdi Army was dissolved, it is either empty or very dangerous. First of all, not only Sadrists but also other observers have pointed out that excluding parties from running in elections is not the prerogative of the prime minister. It is a matter that would have to be passed by parliament. And since the parliamentarians who would be voting to dissolve all militias ahead of elections are all in parties that maintain militias, it would be political suicide for them to vote that way. Of course, they could just play the hypocrite card and declare, as Lowry did, that their militias are not militias, whereas the Mahdi Army is a militia.

But if the Sadrists are really excluded from civil politics, and they are the majority in the South, then you will have just pushed a majority of Iraqis out of the political process and potentially into civil violence. Isn't that the opposite of the goal here?

Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who emerged triumphant from an Iraqi government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has called for a "million-strong" march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. The demonstration just happens to fall on one of the days that General David Petraeus is to report to Congress on post-surge "progress" in Iraq. This is unlikely to be pure happenstance. Despite being regularly labeled "hot-headed," a "firebrand," and the like in the American press, Sadr, as Patrick Cockburn shows in his new book Muqtada, is a canny, cautious, strategically savvy political leader. In fact, he has turned out to play the life-and-death game of Iraqi politics better than any of the teams of American and Iraqi officials sent up against him, including most recently Gen. Petraeus, American Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

As you watch Petraeus and Crocker go through their paces today and tomorrow, don't imagine them alone at that table in front of a Senate committee. There's a ghostly figure beside them, that "hot-headed" "radical cleric," who has made a mockery of their plans for a pacified Iraq. For those of us who don't know enough about that shadowy figure, Patrick Cockburn is, at this second, riding to the rescue. When it comes to timing, you couldn't ask for better. His book on Sadr, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq is being published this very day as the cleric fights for news space with the general. As with so much else in these last years in Iraq, Cockburn was taking Sadr's true measure while others, including actual hot-headed figures like that Bush administration viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, continued to look elsewhere or radically underestimate him.

Seymour Hersh has called Cockburn, who writes for the British paper, the *Independent*, "quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today." It's hard to disagree with that. In a war of reportorial embedment, he's been a unilateral, an almost recklessly, daringly free agent. He's had some good company over the years: Robert Fisk in looted Baghdad amid the ashes of the royal archives of Iraq in April 20003 (". . . and the Americans did nothing . . ."); Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post wandering the backstreets of Baghdad in somewhat better days; freelancer Nir Rosen in Fallujah in 2004; the British Guardian's correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad with the Sunni resistance and recently in embattled Baghdad; various correspondents for Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy), including Leila Feidel, and a host of barely credited or uncredited Iraqi reporters working for Western outfits (whose normal journalists can hardly circulate in Iraq). But Cockburn, who never seems to stop circulating, is still sui generis.

The following piece on Moqtada al-Sadr is the final chapter of Cockburn's new book and appears at Tomdispatch.com thanks to his publisher, Scribner, and his fine editor Colin Robinson. It's the perfect antidote to Petraeus's assessment of the Iraqi situation. Too bad our senators won't hear Muqtada al-Sadr's version of the same. Cockburn's book, by the way, is eye-opening.

Moqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the religious and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass whose lives were ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression, and sanctions.

From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated him. So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his followers.

During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S. "surge" of 2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, he generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So far from being the inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed -- when he first appeared they denigrated him as a zatut (an "ignorant child," in Iraqi dialect) -- he was a highly experienced political operator who had worked in his father's office in Najaf since he was a teenager. He also had around him activist clerics, of his own age or younger, who had hands-on experience under Saddam of street politics within the Shia community. His grasp of what ordinary Iraqis felt was to prove far surer than that of the politicians isolated in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have happened to Moqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their political and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia masses. From the moment Saddam was overthrown, Moqtada rarely deviated from his open opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority of the Shia community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.

As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew among the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make a Shia-Sunni civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi politicians, and the Western media habitually failed to recognize the extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.

All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supported Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly loyal Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis were deeply conscious that their country sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like ability to make catastrophic errors in peace and war had reduced the people to a state in which their children were stunted because they did not get enough to eat.

The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the same fury possessed Moqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier in Shia Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist movement. Instead, people saw their living standards plummet as provision of food rations, clean water, and electricity faltered. Saddam's officials were corrupt enough, but the new government cowering in the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracy comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Moqtada 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.

Moqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of this highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and elder brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were assassinated in 1999 he had every reason to stress his lack of ability or ambition in order to give the mukhabarat [Saddam Hussein's secret police] less reason to kill him. As the son and son-in-law of two of Saddam Hussein's most dangerous opponents, he was a prime suspect and his every move was watched.

When Saddam fell, Moqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears' political inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on every possible occasion. Posters showed Moqtada alongside Sadr I and Sadr II [Moqtada's father-in-law and father, both assassinated by Saddam] against a background of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than a leader exploiting his connection to a revered or respected parent. Moqtada persistently emphasized the Sadrist ideological legacy: puritanical Shia Islam mixed with anti-imperialism and populism.

The first time I thought seriously about Moqtada was a grim day in April 2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine, Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had often discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Moqtada himself, which is a matter of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist supporters in the lynching is proven and was the start of a pattern that was to repeat itself over the years.

Moqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over, sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and actions were often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni against the occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni, orchestrating the pogroms against them and failing to restrain the death squads of the Mahdi Army. The excuse that it was "rogue elements" among his militiamen who were carrying out this slaughter is not convincing, because the butchery was too extensive and too well organized to be the work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists and the Shia in general could argue that it was not they who had originally taken the offensive against the Sunni, and the Shia community endured massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda for several years before their patience ran out.

Moqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious leaders unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on Shia civilians if he was to cooperate with them against the occupation. They did not do so, and this was a shortsighted failure on their part, since the Shia, who outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq, controlled the police and much of the army. Their retaliation, when it came, was bound to be devastating. Moqtada was criticized for not doing more, but neither he, nor anybody else could have stopped the killing at the height of the battle for Baghdad in 2006. The Sunni and Shia communities were both terrified, and each mercilessly retaliated for the latest atrocity against their community. "We try to punish those who carry out evil deeds in the name of the Mahdi Army," says Hussein Ali, the former Mahdi Army leader. "But there are a lot of Shia regions that are not easy to control and we ourselves, speaking frankly, are sometimes frightened by these great masses of people."

American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of Moqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were persistent attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government instead of trying to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base to include the Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure from Washington to sever or limit their connection with Moqtada. But government officials were not alone in being perplexed by the young cleric. In a lengthy article on him published in its December 4, 2006, issue, *Newsweek* admitted that "Moqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate in Iraq." But the best the magazine could do to assist its readers in understanding Moqtada was to suggest that they should "think of him as a young Mafia don."

Of course, Moqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader who proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over from Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited, English-speaking exiles who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq into a compliant U.S. ally, Moqtada looked too much like a younger version of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Moqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq, which it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by elections that would produce a government dominated by the Shia allied to the Kurds. It soon became evident that the Shia parties that were going to triumph in any election would be Islamic parties, and some would have close links to Iran.

The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis" developing in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and paranoia on the part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted to make Iraq a client state they would have found the country as prickly a place for Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S. attempt to create an anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian hands and produce the very situation that Washington was trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its nuclear program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had the potential to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with Tehran; and at first Moqtada denounced his Shia opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look to Iran for help, and in a military confrontation the Mahdi Army saw Iran as an essential source of weapons and military expertise.

On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Moqtada called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S. occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The call was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was now largely a Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to their old homes. The U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in sectarian killings, but it was also true that the Shia had won and there were few mixed areas left.

The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were returning. Moqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the Sunni on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never accepted that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on the same street, they could hardly share a common identity.

The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the Sunni population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge," but it was still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide bombs targeting civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare since 2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent groups had turned against al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power within the Sunni community at the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one son from every Sunni family into its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with the government such as garbage collectors were killed.

By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpeting successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely eliminated in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid for by the United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi government. Moqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had quite different ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shia victory in the 2006 battle of Baghdad.

A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of them, Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He operates in the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a commander of the U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls Concerned Citizens. His stated objectives show that the rise of the new Sunni militias may mark only a new stage in a sectarian civil war. "Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed. "After we finish with al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main enemy, the Shia militias. I will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area near Amariya taken over by the Mahdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."

The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Moqtada and his movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning, the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater.

In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play a central role. Moqtada probably represented his constituency of millions of poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he never wholly controlled his own movement, and never created as well-disciplined a force as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his ambitions for reconciliation with the Sunni could take wing unless the Mahdi Army ceased to be identified with death squads and sectarian cleansing.

The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violence diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. The differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respective communities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as great as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mahdi 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.

--Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient of the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006 James Cameron Memorial Award. His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, was short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. This essay is the last chapter in his new book, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, just published by Scribner.