Mao Zedong or David Koresh? Though it is knowingly inexact to employ historical models on contemporary insurgents like Moqtada al-Sadr, such an exercise teases out a few worthwhile distinctions and sets up a continuum that might be further illustrative. Let’s play it out a bit and see how it stands. The question could be framed as: Are Sadr’s insurgent strategies and goals more oriented on a Maoist model -- to engage in a Long March and escape from the present squeeze/siege to fight another day -- or is it to go down in flames of millenarian glory like David Koresh? Mao’s brilliant stratagem by discipline and default was to take a lengthy, agonizing retreat and apparent defeat, in which the KMT hunted down his guerilla army over years and miles inflicting 80% casualties, and then redeem that horrendous campaign into an eventual victory. By 1949, fourteen years after the decimation of the Long March, Mao’s insurgent army had routed the corrupt KMT and established the People’s Republic of China with himself at the helm. Mao, in contrast, operated off a radically different eschatology than Sadr, and the discipline he instilled in his cadres is quite distinct from the fervor that Sadr appears to inspire in his.
The full story on Waco is more complex and disturbing than commonly acknowledged, but the conventional wisdom, which we’ll warily employ as example, has David Koresh ready to sacrifice himself and a fair portion of his followers as part of the Branch Davidian’s apocalyptic vision . Does Sadr possess similar beliefs of martyrdom or do strategic political considerations take precedence in his battlefield calculations and brinkmanship? (N.B. Koresh led a small cult spun off from the Seventh Day Adventists and didn’t have anywhere near the level of support that Sadr commands.) For its adherents, Shiite messianism strikes different resonances than its Christian analog, notably in its long line of betrayed martyrs and how these sacred tragedies retain the potential for further movement mobilization. As John Burns writes from Baghdad:
And Mr. Sadr, dead, would be at least as much of a problem for Mr. Allawi's government - and for the Americans - as he has been alive.
Martyrdom is central to Shiite beliefs, and Mr. Sadr's legions would in time be marshaled by another tribune of the streets. The pattern has been set by Mr. Sadr himself, who built his following on the 1998 assassination in Najaf - by agents of Mr. Hussein, most Iraqis believe - of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, Mr. Sadr's venerated father.


Equipped with his martyrdom trumpcard, Sadr can engage in repeated rounds of brinkmanship, daring Allawi and US forces to ignite the historical import of his death at their hands. Perhaps a decent way to approach Sadr and his Mahdi Army is to throw up a spectrum with Mao (tactical retreat) and Koresh (inferno) at its poles and slide the Moqtada marker along it as the situation fluctuates wildly. To date, with his calls for an Islamic Republic unheeded, first rebellion suspended and the Najaf stand-off unresolved, it appears that Sadr’s primary concern is to keep his militia intact and avoid martyrdom, for he’s certainly had plenty of chances to visit paradise.
Further muddying attempts to decipher Sadr’s motivations comes from trying to determine the depth of his relationship with Iran. American officials assert some vague correspondence with Iranian agents and logistic support, but the Shiite scholar Juan Cole (August 19th entry: What Does Muqtada al-Sadr Want?) counters that he is not a “catspaw” for Iran but an Iraqi nationalist interested in a Khomeneist republic:

1) He wants the US troops out of the country immediately, which is to say, an end to Occuption. If there have to be foreign troops in Iraq, he wants them under a United Nations command.

2) He refuses to cooperate (he would say "collaborate") with the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi, which he sees as a puppet regime installed by the United States. He insists that no legitimate Iraqi governmental process can begin until the US is out.

3) He wants the reestablishment of a strong central Iraqi government with a strong military, but which has cut all ties with the Baathist past.

4) He wants Iraq to stay together rather than being partitioned, and has denounced Kurdish demands for loose federalism.

5) He wants Iraqi Shiism to emerge from Iran's shadow and to establish its independence from Iran. His movement is rooted in the Shiite ghettos of Iraq and is very indigenous. He is not Iran's catspaw in Iraq, quite the opposite. He is strong Iraqi nationalist.

6) He sometimes talks about "democracy" in post-American Iraq, but probably just means populism. Like Peron and Franco, his populism implies his ability to maintain and direct his own militia, who provide "order" (read puritanical morality imposed by force) to Shiite neighborhoods.

7) In the long term, he would like to see a system in Iraq similar to the regime in Iran. He wants Islamic law to be the law of the land, and he wants clerics to rule. His father studied with Ayatollah Khomeini and accepted the notion of clerical rule. So does Muqtada. That is, there may be a place for elections (as in Iran), but true power would rest in the hands of the clerics. He has admitted all this in Arabic press interviews.

- posted by Editor @ 5:52 PM

 
Having burned so much international credibility and goodwill in the Iraq debacle, the US finds itself in a deplorably weak diplomatic position to aid the beleaguered refugees and victims of Darfur. The Sudanese regime, both in arming the Janjaweed and by supplying air cover, is clearly complicit in ethnically motivated massacres that can not be allowed by the international community to continue or worsen. As horrifying as these crimes are, American leadership is too crippled by recent mistakes to take a dominant role in intervening . . . and even liberal hawks like Paul Berman, who were so overeager to invade Iraq, realize the harsh irony their bad gamble has wrought. Berman writes in Five Lessons From A Bad Year:

The U.S. failure in Somalia led to a different kind of U.S. failure in Rwanda. There will surely be Rwandas in the future--there is one right now in Darfur, Sudan (where the ethnic cleansers come out of the same mix of radical Islamism and Arab nationalism that has caused so much suffering in many other places, including our own places). Who in his right mind is going to call for U.S. intervention? Doubtless, in the future, when things are not so grim for us, some people will, in fact, call for U.S. interventions, and justly so. And yet, other people are going to say, Oh, right, and let's put Donald Rumsfeld in charge. And this will be a devastating reply.

Berman’s assumption here is that regime change is the predominant, perhaps sole, form of intervention, but are there other options for an international force in Sudan? In confronting the Sudanese state, the primary goal of the concerned international community has been to convince the regime of the errors of its ways and simply rein in the Janjaweed. While putatively pragmatic in its diplomatic approach (keeping Sudan’s sovereignty intact), efforts such as the threat of sanctions have so far borne unbearable few results and should the massacres accelerate, more drastic measure will be required to stop them. There is troublesome evidence of cooperation between the Janjaweed and reactionary elements from the sidelined National Islamic Front (active in the current government), and with vile pro-Al-Qaeda characters such as Hussan al-Turabi still waiting in the wings, the list of armed variables with jihadist credentials that would have to be dealt with after the present regime of Omar al-Bashir fell is already dizzying. Sudan, like Iraq, is a colonial boundary that may not encompass a viable nation-state, and the present crisis has more than a few roots in the long-running civil war instigated by the British in 1955. The Economist speculates that the Sudanese may not possess the military resources to leash the monster they’ve created, and as the recent example of Pakistan’s ISI and the Taliban have shown, a switch in allegiance doesn’t always resonate throughout all aspects of the state. An engagement aimed at explicit regime change in Khartoum, especially one led by an American force, is not a viable option and there seems little will among other regional players such as the African Union to attempt such a bold solution under their own aegis.
Concerned global actors fear for intervening more forcefully derives in part from the realization that the overthrow of the Khartoum regime is too titanic and bloody a task, especially in trying to unite the nation once the state is smashed. But what if an international or regional force were to deploy and secure the territory of Darfur alone, set up a United Nations protectorate and leave the Sudanese regime intact for the rest of the nation? There are similar examples, some unintended, in the cases of previous ethnic cleansing such as Serbia and Kosovo, Indonesia and East Timor and perhaps Iraq and Kurdistan. A policy justifying this action would assert that regimes which perpetrate widespread massacres, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide, have lost the right to govern the territory in which these atrocities have been committed. Dismemberment of a failed state, by the international community in response to the perpetration of crimes against humanity, is not regime change though the latter may follow. A UN run protectorate could insure the administration of the territory, its security, and seek either independence through elections or, should the situation merit, eventual reintegration with the state through a truth and reconciliation style commission. Reintegration, if possible, would require long term negotiations and most likely United Nations monitoring to war against regime recidivism. Establishment of a protectorate would seek to answer the exigency of massacres or worse while avoiding the dilemma of overthrowing and occupying a state in which significant populations remain loyal to the previous regime and/or are dead-set against an international occupation.
Confronted with the urgency of the present tragedy, it is tempting to advocate for immediate deployment and worry later about the complicit regime in Khartoum, however, an international force (successfully) deployed will have de facto created a region partitioned from Sudanese sovereignty and must be prepared to run it for some time. Without and established protectorate how long would peacekeepers from donor nations stay? What’s to guarantee the safety of the people of Darfur once they leave? As the agonizing example of Iraq has shown, it is better to have some realistic conception of an endgame before launching an intervention.
Such a solution is far from a panacea and there are many difficulties foreseeable as well as situations where enforced protectorates would be outright unadvisable in different context. Would the protectorate hived off from the offending nation be a viable state in itself? What of pro-regime populations remaining within the new secured territory? In Darfur, it would be conceivable that peacekeepers might have to protect some “Arabic” populations from retribution and more refugees could conceivably flow into the new protectorate. (In tragedies such as Rwanda, the Tutsis and Hutus were too intermingled to create a separate region as safehaven.) In response to a violation of its sovereignty, it is conceivable that Khartoum could reinitiate hostilities in the South so the international deployment should prepare for such counterstrikes. The confiscation of a whole territory under international auspices, while leaving the state to govern the remnant, is a blatant challenge to its legitimacy that will not go unanswered. Faced with the possibility of the conflict spreading it is all the more important to line up regional allies beforehand for a shared endgame and negotiations with the regime post-partum.
Resource mobilization is vital before deployment to prepare for the coordination of the many NGOs and bureaucracies that can assist in the administration of the new protectorate. The need to distribute food, shelter, and basic necessities are components of the first stage of such a humanitarian venture with following stages such as crop planting for next year’s harvest not far behind. Short of an international protectorate, is the Sudanese government capable or even willing, to provide the same care for its beleaguered citizens in Darfur? Negotiations to goad the recalcitrant Sudanese regime into suppressing the Janjaweed and punishing collaborating elements within their own house will have precedence, but as the massacres continue, much more dramatic action will be required from the international community. A humanitarian intervention that seeks to limit its mandate to the specific region of the aggrieved may avoid the recent pitfalls of America in Iraq while ending a horror that challenges the very conception of there being an international community.

- posted by Editor @ 10:21 AM