Better inside the tent

The return this week of firebrand political/religious/militia leader Moqtada al Sadr to Baghdad is a major event for Iraqi politics.  Matt Duss offers a fine summary of Sadr’s significance at the Wonk Room.   To make a long story short, Sadr left Iraq more than three years ago for religious studies in Qom (and likely also Tehran) in order to gain at least a minimal claim as heir to his father’s and father-in-law’s religious prestige, as well as the title of ayatollah.  During his time away, Iraq’s frighteningly violent Shia/Sunni violence ended, in part because Prime Minister Maliki ordered Iraqi security forces into action against Sadr’s militia, the Mehdi Army, in both Basra and Baghdad.

But enmity is not forever.  Sadr’s political movement won 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament last March, threw its political support behind a second mandate for Maliki at a critical moment in the fall, and now occupies eight ministerial posts in the recently confirmed second Maliki government.  Sadr has played his political cards well.

He is a notoriously erratic person, but so far his return seems clearly targeted on maintaining and increasing his political weight, rather than returning to any kind of violent insurgency. He and his people are talking up Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi state, talking down the occupation and the Americans (and insisting they leave Iraq by the agreed deadline of December 31) and warning that they will be watching the government’s performance in delivering services to the poor, who in the Shia parts of Iraq are enthusiasts for Sadr. The fondest hope of those of us who watch Iraq is that disputes will be settled nonviolently in the parliament and provincial councils as well as the courts, not to mention our hope that the people of Iraq will get better services.  If Sadr remains on his current path, the news is definitively good.

But what, you may ask, of the charges against Sadr for the murder of his archrival Abdul Majid al Khoei in 2003?  No one should forget it, that is for sure, and the Khoei family won’t allow us to. This is one of those difficult cases where justice and peace diverge:  accountability would require an arrest and trial; peace requires restraint.  Until sufficient evidence can be brought before an Iraqi court, and a trial conducted in an atmosphere conducive to finding the truth and acting on it, I am afraid accountability will have to wait.  Surely Maliki has had to guarantee that Sadr would not be arrested on his return to Baghdad, and the fact that the Americans can no longer arrest anyone without Iraqi government cooperation gives that guarantee credibility.  And it is still possible that Maliki will find it necessary to give the Sadrists one of the security portfolios in his new government–several key positions remain in caretaker status.

It is important before condemning Maliki’s political pragmatism to realize that Sadr is not just an individual.  Scion of a leading religious family, he leads a substantial political movement with deep roots in Iraqi Shia-dom (not to mention those 40 seats in parliament).  I’d be the last to excuse murder because of that, but the Iraqi state and justice system will have to be far stronger than it is today before it reckons with Sadr’s alleged accountability in the murder of Khoei, not to mention the many less well known Iraqis who died at the hands of the Mehdi Army.  If ever Sadr presents a real threat to Maliki, I have no doubt what the pragmatic prime minister is capable of.  But for the moment, even from an American perspective it is better to have Moqtada inside the tent peeing out.