Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
March 30, 2008 Bad Dreams
By James Glanz
BAGHDAD — Sometime during my four years of traveling to Iraq, I developed a recurring dream in which a Middle Eastern country invades the United States and occupies, among other places, my old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The dream flashed briefly through my mind on Thursday as I walked the dirty, broken streets of Sadr City, a teeming Baghdad slum that forms the power base of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
Here is what happens in the dream: Because I know a little Arabic, I somehow find myself a translator for the invaders, even as some of my Chicago buddies are in the alleys plotting against my employers. And each night when I walk home along my beloved Dearborn Street under the rusty elevated tracks and past the White Hen grocery store, I wonder what the guys poring over maps in their armored vehicles plan to accomplish against a few million South Siders fighting in their own alleys. That’s usually when I wake up.
That dream, a nightmare, really, flashed through my mind as I stood at the end of a filthy, pothole-riddled alley talking with a small-time deputy commander in the Mahdi Army, the militia that is the armed wing of Mr. Sadr’s political movement. Standing there with his arms folded over his potbelly as his fighters scurried about behind him, the man who called himself Riadh, 34 years old, was effectively deputy commander of an alley.
“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”
He could be dead now, because the next day at least one American helicopter swooped over Sadr City and engaged in a gun battle that killed four, according to American military officials, although Iraqi police put the toll much higher. Or the potbellied deputy could still be out there, plotting his next move. Either way, before dismissing the ragtag Mahdi fighters, it would be well to remember that — partly because the alleys of the neighborhoods they control are too narrow for the Iraqi Army’s armored vehicles — Mahdi units like Riadh’s have been fighting Iraq’s federal forces to a standstill in Basra, the country’s southern port city, for nearly a week now.
Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.
What makes the case so difficult is that it is not just a question of a battle with American troops, here from half a world away carrying out operations that Mr. Sadr and his fighters consider an abhorrent occupation. Some 3,500 troops in the Basra fight are Iraqis from outside the province, and witnesses say it is clear that few if any of the Iraqi security forces in the assault know the neighborhoods the way the Mahdi Army does. Its fighters literally pop in and out of alleys, battling a federal force of nearly 30,000 to what is, so far, a stalemate.
What might be called the Alley Effect also has its influence in the political realm. Many of Iraq’s senior political leaders are former exiles, nearly all of them highly intelligent and well educated, and some extremely Westernized. (Although I can’t mention names, some of the most senior leaders of this Muslim country are very fond of a drink now and then. Johnny Walker Red Label, for example, is a particular favorite of one of them — one of the most pleasant and effective, in fact.)
No one has ever accused Mr. Sadr of being brilliant, charismatic, or even above average in the intellectual realm. But he has one thing few of those leaders have: he never left, even in the worst years of Saddam Hussein. And that does not just give him credibility on the streets. In a country where sheer social, religious, political, historical, geographic and psychological complexities are what seem to defeat all easy solutions, Mr. Sadr is one of the few who have been here continuously, absorbing the shifting lessons of the place. He has done his homework, he has put in his time.
And he has received the kind of props that must make an alley fighter proud. Two weeks ago, when I learned of the impending assault during a trip to Basra, senior Iraqi officials said that the crackdown would be unrelenting. “Whoever gets in the way will be dealt with swiftly, decisively and with no mercy,” one of them said.
But when Iraqi forces made little progress in Mahdi-controlled neighborhoods after the offensive began on Tuesday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who staked his political credibility on the operation by traveling personally to Basra to direct it, issued a curious 72-hour ultimatum to the fighters to lay down their weapons — or face consequences.
It was hard to imagine, after the start of an assault involving 30,000 troops, what more severe consequences could be. If the emptiness of the ultimatum was not enough to suggest that Mr. Maliki had left himself no way out of the alley except to back down, on Friday he said that he would offer money to anyone in Basra who turned in a weapon over the following ten days.
American forces have also found that they have little choice but to respect Mr. Sadr. After years of referring to him as little more than a thug — including a vicious battle against his fighters in Najaf in 2004 — the American military has begun referring to him as “Sayyid,” the honorific title accorded to a Muslim holy man. This is particularly true when military officials praise a loophole-riddled cease-fire that Mr. Sadr ordered last August, when he said that his militia should stop fighting but could respond in self-defense if attacked first.
“We have and will continue to show restraint in dealing with those who honor al-Sayyid Moktada al-Sadr’s pledge of honor to halt attacks,” Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, said in a press briefing on Wednesday in response to a question.
As I sit here writing this piece, listening to the intermittent whooshes and booms of rockets and mortars fired into the Green Zone, almost certainly by Mr. Sadr’s fighters, I can no more predict where the conflict is headed than I can say what will be in my dreams tonight during the few hours of sleep that this war and my editors allow me. But when it comes to Mr. Sadr’s loyalists in the alleys of Basra and Baghdad, one thing is irrefutable.
In those alleys, waking up will not end the dream.
March 30, 2008 Bad Dreams
By James Glanz
BAGHDAD — Sometime during my four years of traveling to Iraq, I developed a recurring dream in which a Middle Eastern country invades the United States and occupies, among other places, my old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The dream flashed briefly through my mind on Thursday as I walked the dirty, broken streets of Sadr City, a teeming Baghdad slum that forms the power base of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
Here is what happens in the dream: Because I know a little Arabic, I somehow find myself a translator for the invaders, even as some of my Chicago buddies are in the alleys plotting against my employers. And each night when I walk home along my beloved Dearborn Street under the rusty elevated tracks and past the White Hen grocery store, I wonder what the guys poring over maps in their armored vehicles plan to accomplish against a few million South Siders fighting in their own alleys. That’s usually when I wake up.
That dream, a nightmare, really, flashed through my mind as I stood at the end of a filthy, pothole-riddled alley talking with a small-time deputy commander in the Mahdi Army, the militia that is the armed wing of Mr. Sadr’s political movement. Standing there with his arms folded over his potbelly as his fighters scurried about behind him, the man who called himself Riadh, 34 years old, was effectively deputy commander of an alley.
“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”
He could be dead now, because the next day at least one American helicopter swooped over Sadr City and engaged in a gun battle that killed four, according to American military officials, although Iraqi police put the toll much higher. Or the potbellied deputy could still be out there, plotting his next move. Either way, before dismissing the ragtag Mahdi fighters, it would be well to remember that — partly because the alleys of the neighborhoods they control are too narrow for the Iraqi Army’s armored vehicles — Mahdi units like Riadh’s have been fighting Iraq’s federal forces to a standstill in Basra, the country’s southern port city, for nearly a week now.
Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.
What makes the case so difficult is that it is not just a question of a battle with American troops, here from half a world away carrying out operations that Mr. Sadr and his fighters consider an abhorrent occupation. Some 3,500 troops in the Basra fight are Iraqis from outside the province, and witnesses say it is clear that few if any of the Iraqi security forces in the assault know the neighborhoods the way the Mahdi Army does. Its fighters literally pop in and out of alleys, battling a federal force of nearly 30,000 to what is, so far, a stalemate.
What might be called the Alley Effect also has its influence in the political realm. Many of Iraq’s senior political leaders are former exiles, nearly all of them highly intelligent and well educated, and some extremely Westernized. (Although I can’t mention names, some of the most senior leaders of this Muslim country are very fond of a drink now and then. Johnny Walker Red Label, for example, is a particular favorite of one of them — one of the most pleasant and effective, in fact.)
No one has ever accused Mr. Sadr of being brilliant, charismatic, or even above average in the intellectual realm. But he has one thing few of those leaders have: he never left, even in the worst years of Saddam Hussein. And that does not just give him credibility on the streets. In a country where sheer social, religious, political, historical, geographic and psychological complexities are what seem to defeat all easy solutions, Mr. Sadr is one of the few who have been here continuously, absorbing the shifting lessons of the place. He has done his homework, he has put in his time.
And he has received the kind of props that must make an alley fighter proud. Two weeks ago, when I learned of the impending assault during a trip to Basra, senior Iraqi officials said that the crackdown would be unrelenting. “Whoever gets in the way will be dealt with swiftly, decisively and with no mercy,” one of them said.
But when Iraqi forces made little progress in Mahdi-controlled neighborhoods after the offensive began on Tuesday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who staked his political credibility on the operation by traveling personally to Basra to direct it, issued a curious 72-hour ultimatum to the fighters to lay down their weapons — or face consequences.
It was hard to imagine, after the start of an assault involving 30,000 troops, what more severe consequences could be. If the emptiness of the ultimatum was not enough to suggest that Mr. Maliki had left himself no way out of the alley except to back down, on Friday he said that he would offer money to anyone in Basra who turned in a weapon over the following ten days.
American forces have also found that they have little choice but to respect Mr. Sadr. After years of referring to him as little more than a thug — including a vicious battle against his fighters in Najaf in 2004 — the American military has begun referring to him as “Sayyid,” the honorific title accorded to a Muslim holy man. This is particularly true when military officials praise a loophole-riddled cease-fire that Mr. Sadr ordered last August, when he said that his militia should stop fighting but could respond in self-defense if attacked first.
“We have and will continue to show restraint in dealing with those who honor al-Sayyid Moktada al-Sadr’s pledge of honor to halt attacks,” Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, said in a press briefing on Wednesday in response to a question.
As I sit here writing this piece, listening to the intermittent whooshes and booms of rockets and mortars fired into the Green Zone, almost certainly by Mr. Sadr’s fighters, I can no more predict where the conflict is headed than I can say what will be in my dreams tonight during the few hours of sleep that this war and my editors allow me. But when it comes to Mr. Sadr’s loyalists in the alleys of Basra and Baghdad, one thing is irrefutable.
In those alleys, waking up will not end the dream.