MUQTADA AL-SADR AND THE FALL OF IRAQ by PATRICK COBURN

Written at a time when the Shia resistance was consolidating the political landscape and already making Iraq a major Iranian sphere of influence came the military resistance led by Muqtada Al-Sadr which set US forces into a retreat , thus making US planners realise the Military domination of Iraq was already in an unstoppable countdown.

The reason of success for the Shia was that they formed an alternative Government first and then the object of the Political and military resistance was to defeat the Occupation and put the Alternative Government in place.

Patrick Coburn was the first writer of a Book about the young leader Muqtada , this makes it a bit of a , albeit an informed one , rushed job on a fast moving and evolving scene. This review by James Denselow points out some of the weaker construction of the Book.

 "Patrick Cockburn's friend and colleague Robert Fisk once wrote that he saw journalism as `writing the first draft of history'. On the sleeve of Cockburn's latest book on Iraq it states that `this is the first book about Muqtada al-Sadr, the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq'. The question that arises is did Cockburn have enough material to write a biography of al-Sadr? Or did the gap in knowledge and frenzy in politics surrounding the Iraqi cleric prompt the publishers into pushing Cockburn into writing a first draft instead?

Reading the book one discovers that it is indeed the later. But Cockburn knows Iraq well enough to write a decent background account of the rise of Shia in Iraq that will appeal to those who are unsatisfied with the US official rendering of Muqtada as little more than a renegade. It reads as a coherent narrative heavily laced with journalistic anecdotal evidence to provide a very readable background to one of the `new Iraq's' new politician's.

The difficulty is access to Muqtada himself. Cockburn's experience in the first chapter, where he just manages to avoid death at the hands of the Sadrists, highlights the danger in getting close to him. So despite reading an entire book nominally about him, the reader is still left wondering who the man behind the evolving myth actually is.

Cockburn covers a lot of ground very quickly in the book. He starts with a twelve page introduction to `the Shi'a of Iraq' and races on through the Iran-Iraq War, the subsequent Shia uprising and the various trials and tribulations of Muqtada's family as they walk the deadly tightrope of the Saddam era. The cornerstone of Cockburn's book is to connect the history of the Shia with its relevance today - which is an implicit critique of those who would enter Iraq from an ahistorical perspective. At one point he explains how post-invasion the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani banned chess. Why? because `Yazid was playing chess in his palace in Damascus when the head of Imam Hussein was brought to him' (p.26).

The key focus is on the rise of Muqtada. Cockburn explains his emergence as the response to a vacuum created by an ill-conceived and unimaginative US invasion. The collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime and the inability of the US to replace it allowed the Shia clergy and its mosques, repressed for so long under Saddam, to spring up and take control of vast swathes of local politics. It was the failures of the invasion plan, combined with earlier failures in the West's policy towards Iraq, that set the scene for an environment into which Muqtada would emerge. Cockburn cites the mass impoverishment of Iraqis as an essential precondition for the `swift rise of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr in the early 1990s and his son Muqtada after 2003' (p.107).

Cockburn's short chapters covering lengthy historical events argue that Muqtada was a natural and predictable consequence of the fall of Iraq. The US occupation of Iraq and the initial top-down `Coalition Provisional Authority' (CPA) run by Paul Bremer, could never accept this existence of a contesting authority figure. That Sadr's support was based on a grassroots legitimacy born from the split blood of his own family clashed with CPA's bunkered Green Zone mentality that somehow Washington staffers could build the new Iraq as they liked.

Cockburn is correct when he points out that "the Shia were not, after all, trying to break up Iraq, but get their fair share of power within it" (p.82). Ironically, considering that America considered Iraq's sovereign unity a matter of critical importance, the CPA supported the Iranian backed SCIRI and exiled based Dawa party over a homegrown Sadrist alliance. Muqtada even harnessed what was left of battered Iraqi nationalism and in 2005 offered support to the besieged insurgents in Fallujah.

There is little doubt about the importance of Muqtada al Sadr in the deeply fragmented political landscape of modern Iraq. Cockburn's work is a testimony to this importance, yet you feel that much more will and can be written on one of Iraq's most elusive figures."

Like a revolution in Iran , we find that the Al-Sadr senior leaders under Saddam the " Shia now possessed a clergy and religious organisation that was separate from the State.Potentially it could provide an alternative leadership for the Shia. The death of Al-Sadr Senior meant that the younger Al-Sadr could take this "organisation" in a society that had " no central government in many centuries...explains the strength of non-state agencies."

We also find that the massacre of the communists when Saddam came to power was also accompanied to the slaughter of shias in government and civil service positions whilst the nationalisation of the Baathist regime took business away from shias and into mainly sunni led government.

In this interview Patrick Coburn gives more insight into Muqtada and Iraqi affairs before the pullout.


This article from Counterpunch sees Coburn giving his assessement on the retirement from politics by Al-Sadr in 2014