Najaf: Cost outweighs gain for US

Jay Garner, the original choice as US Administrator in Iraq, was dismissed after a month because he called for early elections in Iraq. Rumsfeld was worried that an elected Iraqi government would resist mass privatisation of the economy, but he was equally worried that such a government would be Shiite-dominated, and insist on an Islamic state. The problem was compounded by the fact that Washington's favorite ayatollah, Abdul Majid Al Khoei, was killed the day after Baghdad fell. Khoei had become a personal friend of British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his long exile in London, and had strong US backing. But a mob hacked him to death in the Imam Ali Mosque, Hazrat Ali (R)'s shrine in Najaf on April 10, 2003, the day after he arrived, leaving the field open to less pro-American rivals. One was Iraq's current senior ayatollah, Ali Al Sistani, an Iranian-born scholar who issued a fatwa early in last year's US invasion calling on all Muslims to fight the invading forces. His principal rival for the loyalty of Iraqi Shiites was Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr Al Hakim, an Iraqi-born cleric who had spent more than twenty years in exile in Iran after backing that country's Islamic regime against Iraq in the 1980-88 war.

Hakim was willing to cooperate with the US occupiers in the hope that an election would ultimately give the Shiites power, but he was killed too by a huge car bomb outside Hazrat Ali's Shrine on Aug. 29, 2003. That left only the recalcitrant Sistani and the young firebrand Sadr. At 30, Sadr is less than half the age of his rival, and he lacks a rigorous education in Islamic law, but he is the son of a revered former grand ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1999 and he has a strong following among the urban poor. Last March, Paul Bremer, the then US pro-consul in Iraq made a deal with Sistani. The ayatollah guaranteed that the Shiite would remain quiet this year until President Bush's reelection bid in the

US is safely past, in return for free elections in Iraq early next year.

And then, seeking to insure against the risk that Sadr would try to spoil the deal, Bremer did something very foolish. He attacked Sadr directly. In early April, the US occupation authorities closed down Sadr's newspaper, a 10,000-circulation weekly that stridently condemned the occupation but had little influence, and issued an arrest warrant charging Sadr with Khoei's murder. Sadr took his militia to the sacred city of Najaf and defied the Americans to come and get him. Impoverished young Shiites rose in revolt in east Baghdad and the cities of the south, and hundreds died before the US command negotiated a truce. By then, Sadr was famous across Iraq and the whole Muslim world. US troops now fighting their way into Najaf, could even have violated the Hazrat Ali's shrine and kill Sadr. But they have to pay the price, and the price in American lives would not even be great. American firepower, equipment and training means that a hundred young Shiite men die in the fighting for every American who is killed. But the political price would have been huge, so the US forces were called off in May. Why are they attacking again now?

Whatever the truth about the incident that restarted the fighting, it's clearly an American choice to go for broke against Sadr. US forces were under no compulsion to escalate as they have done, and the newly appointed Iraqi 'transitional government' could not have forced them to. The likely answer is that the sudden removal of Sistani from the scene (he flew to London for heart treatment two weeks ago) has made Sadr too powerful, and too dangerous to the 'transitional government', to be left alive. There are to be no witnesses this time. Journalists in Najaf have been driven out. But if this ends in a last stand and a massacre of Al Mahdi militia, the long-term cost to the United States will far outweigh any possible gains. The strategy would likely be a counter productive one.

Sirajul Islam is a social sciences researcher and consultant