The Battle For Baghdad
For U.S. Troops, this may be the last chance to head off a full-blown civil war. There's a plan, but will it work?
To do such a deal, a senior coalition official says, it is essential not to demonize the key players. Right now, one such "demon" is Moqtada al-Sadr, the young firebrand Shiite cleric who has built both a potent militia and a highly popular political movement over the past three years. His party now controls five ministries and has 32 legislators, and his militia, Jaish al-Mahdi, numbers in the thousands. This official argues that a multipronged approach must be taken to the militias' various components, which include unemployed youths who are the foot soldiers, the criminal opportunists who run the bomb factories, and the hard-core fundamentalists who are torturing and executing Iraqis for belonging to the wrong sect.
Disbanding. In fact, that very approach was advocated as part of a security plan written about six months ago. Under it, each militia would produce a one-time list of members, and some number would be allowed to join the Iraqi security forces as individuals and spread across different units. The Badr Brigades Shiite militia, for example, which has about 17,500 members, would be given 5,000 slots. Many of its members are aging, so an economic incentive might be sufficient to win their retirement. The key to making this plan work is to offer it simultaneously to both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. Some of the Shiite-led government's members, however, want to make the offer only to Shiites.
The lack of a political compact has direct bearing on the security mess. First, the length of time it took to form the government created a vacuum in which the militias' strength and influence grew. Maliki, named prime minister in April after months of haggling among the parties, espoused a 24-point national reconciliation plan, but lack of progress has it hanging by a thread today. One sign of gridlock occurred after Iraqi Army commanders asked that the government's Council of Representatives reaffirm Maliki's order that all illegal armed groups, Shiite and Sunni, be pursued equally. The council adjourned, instead, for summer break. The result? Still more violence. "There are forces in Baghdad," a senior coalition official says, "who feel they do not have the support of the government yet to confront some of the threats that are impacting them daily."
The economic deficiencies in Washington's Iraq strategy are every bit as glaring as the political ones. Of more than $300 billion spent on the war here, one senior official calculates that only about $8 billion has gone for economic reconstruction, services, and infrastructure. The imperative to provide economic benefits to ordinary Iraqis is not born out of some vague humanitarian impulse, U.S. military officials here emphasize, but one that directly affects the security of the country and the viability of the government. "That is how you get people to help you police the environment and provide you with the intelligence you need," says a senior official. "With a little more investment, we could turn Baghdad around," he adds, suggesting a figure of $10 billion over three years. "How do we know this approach won't work? We haven't even tried it yet."
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