Who Won Iraq’s “Decisive” Battle?, Gary Brecher, The War Nerd, asks. Not us:
By attacking Sadr’s neighborhoods this week, Maliki’s troops pushed the Shia masses closer to Sadr; and by losing, they made the slum people prouder than ever of their home team. That’s what you get when you go for a “defining moment” in guerrilla war.
The current action is largely Shia versus Shia, to see who can seize power:
The Shia are divided into two major factions: Maliki is our guy, but his real loyalty is to a middle-class Shia group that has military and political wings. The political wing is the Dawa Party; the military group used to be called the Badr Brigade, but these days it calls itself the Iraqi Army.The Badr Brigade has an interesting history. During the Iran-Iraq War, it fought for the Iranians against Saddam, as a big (50,000-man) auxiliary unit. When we disbanded Saddam’s army and the Sunni went insurgent, the Badr Brigade stepped smoothly into the power vacuum and became the core of the new Iraqi Army. So don’t think of this as a real Western-style national army, drawn from all of Iraq’s various groups or any of that crap. The current Iraqi Army is a particular Shia militia that just happens to be willing to wear the uniforms we bought them. They’re not really in it for “the nation,” much less their American paymasters. They’re there to use their new fancy weapons and big money to push the Dawa Party’s agenda down everybody else’s throats.
Brecher notes that “Sadr called off his boys for lots of good reasons”:
- The first job of a guerrilla army is to stay alive. That’s much more important than winning a Western-style victory.
- The next most important job of a guerrilla army is to maintain and grow its support in the neighborhood. By calling off the fight, he spares his people further gore and destruction and comes off as the compassionate defender of the poor.
- A guerrilla army facing occupiers with a monopoly on air power is committing suicide by going for total victory on the ground, seizing an entire city or district.
- It would be stupid to die fighting the Americans when everyone in Iraq knows the US just doesn’t figure much in the long term.
Apparently Brecher’s book is coming out soon.