The Lessons of Najaf

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Just by hanging tough, the young cleric muscled his way—without even being there—into the national conference that met last week to name an interim legislature. Delegates who were supposed to focus on participation in the democratic process found their business eclipsed by the crisis in Najaf. A conference delegation trooped there hoping to talk al-Sadr into leaving the shrine and transforming his militia into a political movement, only to be refused an audience with the cleric. The next day, he said he might be willing to comply, then said he would seek "victory or martyrdom," then turned accommodating again.

But Allawi had lost patience with all the tense back and forth. He issued a "final call" for al-Sadr to leave the shrine compound and disband his militia. And for hours that night, U.S. planes dropped bombs, gunships strafed rebel positions near the shrine, and tanks shelled militia hideaways as explosions filled the sky over the Old City with billowing smoke and a deadly orange glow. U.S. military commanders said they were merely "shaping the battlefield" in case a frontal assault was ordered. But al-Sadr is adept at divining when to back down. On Friday he promised to "turn over the keys" of the sacred shrine to representatives of Sistani, the most revered Shi'ite religious leader, who has been out of the country for weeks while receiving cardiac treatment in London. Over the weekend an ambiguous resolution seemed to take hold as al-Sadr's fighters removed weapons from the shrine and the numbers holed up inside dwindled from as many as 2,000 early in the week to a few hundred. But their leader emerged from the fray with much of his militia intact.

U.S. officials and Middle East experts warn that a failure to crush the Mahdi Army will encourage militants across the country to multiply. Other political and ethnic factions have fielded armed militias since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and many wield more authority than Allawi's government. Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni says the Americans who ran Iraq after the invasion are to blame for the unchecked growth of the militias "because they didn't have a clear policy on how to deal with them back when they were easier to put down."

Now the U.S. is running out of options. Military commanders are scrambling to create a viable Iraqi army that can take on insurgents on its own, in the hopes that Iraqis desperate for security will offer native forces the kind of support they have withheld from the occupiers. Yet even U.S. generals agree there is no military solution to the violence. "We're really good at combat operations, killing and breaking things," says Major General Pete Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry, the Army division responsible for policing Baghdad. "But if all I am doing is this, I will make more enemies than I kill."

It's a vicious circle, he says, and the worst-case scenario, if inconclusive battles like Najaf repeat themselves, is a nationwide popular uprising. The only hedge against that, says British Major General Andrew Graham, deputy commander of the Multinational Corps- Iraq, is to convince the Iraqi people "that there is hope." That, alas, is the hardest thing in the country to find.