After that go read the London Times' Jihadi studies The obstacles to understanding radical Islam and the opportunities to know it better. Just the following paragraph gives me an idea of what has gone wrong is the re-election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Remember how they laughed at the word nuance? Nuance appears to be something we needed and so instead of using our brains the President used the brawn of our military.Patrick Cockburn was among the first journalists to grasp al-Sadr's influence. In this fascinating biography, he neatly punctures the myth that al-Sadr is a crazy gangster who stumbled into leading thousands of disaffected young Shi'ites in armed rebellion. Instead, he draws upon his own reporting and often overlooked aspects of Iraqi history to present a compelling, detail-packed tale of how al-Sadr outflanked everyone from Saddam Hussein to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Cockburn spends more than half the book recounting the modern history of Iraq's Shi'ites to make one overriding point: that the first but by no means sole reason for al-Sadr's influence is his lineage. His cousin and father-in-law, the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, was one of the most senior and respected leaders of Iraq's Shi'ite community. Baqir chafed against the largely secular, Sunni-led tyranny of the Ba'athists and sought to overthrow the regime by endorsing terror attacks against government figures. Saddam eventually ordered him and his sister to be arrested. Sadrists believe Baqir was forced to witness the rape of his sister before he was executed.
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Cockburn's emphasis on history, though at times tedious, offers some additional lessons, most notably the Sadrists' thirst for revenge spawned by Ba'athist repression, and the animus toward other Shi'ite opposition groups because of their failure to aid the Sadrists in their moments of need. It helps to explain why the Mahdi Army has brutally terrorised the Sunni community, and why al-Sadr, to this day, remains so wary of collaborating with other Shi'ite political leaders.
As American troops converged on Baghdad, Cockburn notes that al-Sadr “moved more quickly than anyone else to organise his supporters”. Within a few days, they had seized control of most schools, mosques and government buildings in Sadr City, the sprawling Shi'ite slum that is home to more than 6m people. I remember visiting the hospital there a few weeks after Saddam was overthrown. The place was under the control of a 31-year-old electronics technician who had not been to medical school. His only claim to power was a one-page edict from al-Sadr's office.
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“One of the grossest of US errors in Iraq was to try to marginalise him and his movement,” writes Cockburn. “Had he been part of the political process from the beginning then the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater. In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play a central part.”
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This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Iraq today. The recent fighting in Basra and Sadr City has once again demonstrated al-Sadr's cunning and power. American military commanders boasted last year that their troop surge had led al-Sadr to flee to Iran and that his militia was splintering. But he appears to have made another shrewd move. Instead of fighting it out with the Americans, he opted to cut a deal with the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to stand down the Mahdi Army - for the time being. Nobody knows for sure what al-Sadr's plans are, but it is clear that he and his militia are not a spent force.
Yet the lack of understanding about the enemy has led to serious inefficiencies and excesses which are starting to become publicly known. An astronomical sum of money has been spent on counter-terrorism and homeland security, much of which has gone to private American consultancies with questionable expertise. Then there is the human cost of the search for enemies. The Kafkaesque conversations between detainees and their accusers at Guantánamo Bay reveal a US military with a chronic lack of accountability and a poor understanding about the Middle East and Islamic activism. The security establishment was not alone in its ignorance about jihadism. Middle East scholars on both sides of the Atlantic had long shunned the study of Islamist militancy for fear of promoting Islamophobia and of being associated with a pro-Israeli political agenda. In these communities, there was a tendency to rely on simple grievance-based explanations of terrorism and to ignore the role of entrepreneurial individuals and organizations in the generation of violence. This is part of the reason why the main contributions to the literature on al-Qaeda in the first few years after 9/11 came from investigative journalists, not academics.
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