Operation Last Chance

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The Muqtada Factor

If you fly over Baghdad in a helicopter, as Petraeus sometimes does when the sun is setting over the sepia-toned city, all seems peaceful. There are crowded markets, kids playing soccer on large dirt fields; downtown Baghdad hasn't been reduced to rubble, as Beirut was in the Lebanese civil war. The increased number of U.S. troops has made many neighborhoods safer, but the relative quiet can convey the false impression of progress. During my week in Iraq — including three days in combat zones — I heard only occasional explosions, mostly in the Green Zone, which is shelled by Shi'ite militias nearly every night, and saw no pitched battles ... and yet the casualties piled up: 36 Americans were killed. There was a spike in Iraqi casualties as well because of horrific bombings at the Mansour Hotel, where al-Qaeda targeted some of the Sunni sheiks who had been cooperating with Petraeus, and at a Shi'ite mosque in downtown Baghdad. The number of daily enemy attacks has more than doubled in the past two years.

The violence is abetted by the political vacuum in Baghdad. The Iraqi government is irresolute to the point of near collapse. It is nowhere near to figuring out how to make a political deal amongst the contending parties that might lead to stability. "All this attention on benchmarks has actually been bad for the process," Ambassador Crocker says. "We've wasted so much time and energy on getting a hydrocarbon law" — that is, a law to divide oil profits amongst the ethnic and religious parties, likely to be approved soon — "but it has very little to do with getting a functioning government in place." The truth is, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is puttering along, happily dependent on the U.S. "There are no consequences for them when they screw up," Crocker says. "Whatever's wrong, we take care of it."

The Bush Administration fantasy — a democratic Iraq that fairly represents the interests of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds — is almost an impediment to the real horse-trading that must take place. Two families — the al-Sadrs and the al-Hakims — dominate Iraqi Shi'ite politics, and the issue of who leads Iraq may ultimately be decided between them. Each has a young leader. "The question is, Does either of these guys have the capacity to move from Prince Hal to King Henry?" said a senior U.S. military official. The Hakim family has traditionally been more aloof — and pro-Iranian — than the Sadrs. The current al-Hakim patriarch is suffering from lung cancer but has designated his son Amal to be the leader of his group, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. "Unlike his father, Amal smiles," a U.S. diplomat told me. "He gave a good speech in Najaf last week. He might actually be a real leader."

But the most important man in Iraq is the other Shi'ite prince, Muqtada al-Sadr, who is 33 and the nominal leader of the most powerful militia in the country, the Mahdi Army. Al-Sadr is often called mercurial — he's supposedly a fervent video-game player — but the evidence says otherwise. He has been a devoted follower of the populist, nationalist, outsider style of his father, the Grand Ayatullah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, which has great appeal for Iraqi Shi'ites. Unlike his father, however, Muqtada has accepted significant support from the Iranians — and fled to Iran for a time, allegedly, after the surge began.

How to handle al-Sadr is the single most important decision to be made by Petraeus and Crocker in the coming months: Is he friend or foe? There are those on the general's staff who believe al-Sadr will be the inevitable winner of the Iraqi power struggle and must be accommodated. Others believe he is an irreconcilable thug. Either way, his strength among the Shi'ite masses is obvious. On Sunday I walked through the Shorja market, the site of John McCain's infamous tour last April. (I, too, was accompanied by a fierce-looking squad of troops in up-armored humvees; the troops teased me about the absence of protective helicopters.) Unlike McCain, I asked the local vendors some political questions. Those I met — and most of the others at Shorja, my Army chaperones later conceded — were al-Sadr supporters. "This is the worst government ever," a cell-phone shopkeeper named Fadhil Taher told me, referring to the Maliki regime. When I asked about al-Sadr, he said, "He's a good leader. You tell America. He's good, good, good. He's a man of peace."