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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (39020)	4/11/2004 5:58:39 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793927

New Republic Blog - MORE ON THE SADR UPRISING: On Friday I suggested that one positive aspect of the current Shia uprising in Iraq is that it means we might actually deal with troublemakers like Moqtada al Sadr while we still have the means to, rather than ignoring the problem until we've handed over political control and drawn down our troops substantially. I also suggested that, had Sadr been a savvier adversary, he might have bided his time until that happened. Well, today's Washington Post has a long and fascinating article chronicling the run up to the confrontation with Sadr, which complicates the picture a bit. On the one hand, the article makes the point that Paul Bremer chose to tighten the pressure on Sadr in late March, by closing down his movement's increasingly anti-American newspaper, al-Hawza. This appears to have been the proximate cause for the Sadr-sponsored uprising, implying that Sadr didn't have a whole lot of choice in the timing of the matter. On the other hand, the article points out that the rhetoric emanating from the paper, and the actions of the Sadr organization generally, had been growing more and more belligerent in recent weeks, making it more crucial for the occupation authorities to respond. As Bremer's spokesman Dan Senor told the Post, the decision to confront Sadr came in response to "a real trend in the ramping-up of very inciteful, highly provocative rhetoric ... that was directed at promoting violence against Americans during a very emotional time.... We had a concern that if he was left unchecked, Americans could wind up getting killed." On top of that, the article says that Sadr had lowered his group's profile this past winter while he focused (successfully, as it turns out) on building up the size of his militia. The combination of these circumstances suggests to me that Sadr did, in fact, control the timing of the confrontation with the U.S. authorities, and that the timing was somewhat of a miscalculation given that several more months of low-grade insurgency could have helped him further increase the size of his militia while postponing an outright confrontation until the coalition forces had dwindled substantially.