There are two faces to Bush's Iraq problem: One is Moktada al-Sadr, the grandstanding Shiite radical cleric whose black-flag militia, the Mahdi Army, is once more battling American troops. The other is Ahmed Chalabi, the wealthy Shiite con man who favors double-breasted Savile Row tailored suits to caftans and turbans, and who used to get invited to all the right parties inside the Beltway but who now has to make do with getting invited to all the right parties in Tehran. America may not deserve either of these unpleasant characters, but there's that Pottery Barn rule to reckon with. George Bush broke Iraq, and now we're pricking our fingers on the shards.
Al-Sadr is the real threat. You know his type: He's a divider, not a uniter. He's an intellectual lightweight, incurious about the world outside his own narrow experience. He's unaccomplished, achieving his prominence by cashing in on the power of his far better respected father. He is rigidly certain of himself, believing that God is on his side. And he's a bellicose hothead with a penchant for apocalyptic rhetoric and unseemly eagerness to sacrifice the youth of his country in the pursuit of his ends. "I told the Mahdi Army that I'm one of them... I will resist, and they will resist with me.... It is an honor to me to fight the Americans," he said on Monday. Bring 'em on, he says of his enemies. He reminds me of somebody, but I can't quite recall who....
America would do well to rid itself of this meddlesome--and extremely dangerous--priest, but taking him out would likely have huge political consequences for the president's reelection hopes, so it won't happen. Like Yasir Arafat, al-Sadr has become too popular to kill (or even arrest), at least before the November election. A final showdown with him is inevitable; were the Bushies' paramount concern the welfare of Iraq they would deal with him sooner rather than later. Otherwise, all they have accomplished there is trade tyranny for anarchy (let freedom reign!). If their primary concern is getting the president reelected, however--and it is--the risk, a very real one, is that killing al-Sadr will entail an ugly Shiite uprising across Iraq, a sharp spike in American casualties, and a political windfall for the Kerry campaign (and we can't have that). The immediate tactic seems to be to try to contain the cleric by breaking his militia, but that won't last. Expect a return to an uneasy cease-fire in the near future.
Instead, the Bushies punish Chalabi. He is a sleazebag, yes, who obligingly provided all the disinformation the neocons (and Judith Miller) could have hoped for in the run-up to the war, but who has since been exposed as a charlatan and a criminal with close ties to the mullahs in Iran. He makes the Bushies look bad, and he also lacks--and this seals his fate--any power base in Iraq. That means he's no real threat, but now that we have a new, less controversial sleazebag to front for us (thank heavens for Iyad Allawi!), Chalabi's expendable. It's to the political advantage of the Bush administration to take him down--hence the arrest warrant issued against him over the weekend--because it's a freebie. No one is going to fight to the death to keep Chalabi in Napoleon brandy and Cohibas (outside the Beltway, anyway).
The truth is that the substantive problem of Iraq--creating some sort of vaguely democratic stability--is increasingly at odds with the politics of Iraq, which is really a subset of the politics of the president's reelection campaign. As a result, the Bushies prioritize getting the wrong man there: Chalabi rather than al-Sadr. So what's new? Remember, they blithely let Osama get away so they could take out Saddam.
