Middle East Clear World

The Trojan Horse?
Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr once merely battled Americans. Now he could bring Islamism to Baghdad in the guise of reform.

by Yochi J. Dreazen
September 22, 2011
BAGHDAD—Tens of thousands of followers of influential Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr flooded the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, and Basra last week for some of the largest public rallies in several years. At one point, they might have been demonstrating—even fighting—against the United States as part of the Sadr-led uprising that made the young man’s name. But these protests weren’t about the U.S. presence. Instead, they focused on a different target: the government of Iraq itself.

After four years of exile in Iran, Sadr has reinvented himself. He has lost none of his anti-American fervor (his political party recently suspended a pair lawmakers merely rumored to have met with American officials), but the Sadr Front—one of the largest members of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s fragile coalition—has surprised many Western and local observers by emerging as a leading critic of the Iraqi government. Its parliamentarians investigate contracts on a line-by-line basis, audit the government’s performance on power generation, and demand that Maliki create the jobs his party promised—hammering the relevant ministers in ways never seen before here. In doing so, they are following a model pioneered by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. If their popularity keeps rising, they may have found a way for Islamism to take hold in a broadly secular country.

At Sadr’s Baghdad protest, some of the 25,000 in attendance carried broken fans, air conditioners, and generators to signal inadequate electricity—a problem on which the United States and Iraq have spent $7 billion since 2003. They carried empty caskets to dramatize Maliki’s failure to create jobs or increase the food rations on which many poor Shia families depend. And the crowd cheered as Sadr Front politicians berated the Iraqi government. “We want services, jobs, and a portion of the oil revenue,” Ibrahim al-Jabiri, a Shiite cleric and political adviser to Sadr, said during the rally. The crowds chanted back, “Now, now, now!”

The oversight hearings, meanwhile, are making for Iraqi-style must-see TV. The parliamentary commission investigating $1.7 billion in fraudulent Electricity Ministry contracts is run by Sadrist Uday Awad. Last month, Awad summoned Raad Shallal (the former minister who inked the deals and then resigned in disgrace) and Hussein al-Shahristani (a deputy prime minister and close Maliki ally) to appear before his panel. Awad and other Sadrists accused the two men of negligence and incompetence.

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Shahristani insisted that he wasn’t involved in the deals and shouldn’t be held accountable, but Awad held up internal documents the committee had gathered that showed Shahristani knew about and supported them. Western officials here said they were impressed by the tenacity of Awad’s investigation: One firm that won a contract doesn’t appear to exist, and the other was already bankrupt when the agreement was signed. “This government is failing to provide what our people need and deserve,” Jawad al-Shihaily, a Sadrist lawmaker, said in an interview. “We will hold them accountable until they do.”

Americans are ambivalent about the evolving Sadrist movement. On one hand, it appears to support democratic values such as reform and transparency. On the other, it echoes moves by other armed Islamist groups in the region—especially Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which now carry out fewer attacks and instead focus on participating in government. Like the leaders of those groups, Sadr takes a populist line on corruption, advocating good-government reforms and appointing technocratic lawmakers and ministers. It has given his movement a more moderate, nonsectarian sheen. “It is becoming much more similar to the Lebanese Hezbollah model,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the top U.S. military spokesman here, said in an interview.

Some American officials fear the model augurs poorly for Iraq. Hezbollah lawmakers brought down Beirut’s government earlier this year; they then forced the appointment of a prime minister tied to their party and unfriendly to Washington. Meanwhile, the group has refused to disband its private militia. Its fighters have acquired new weapons from Iran and threaten new attacks against Israel.

Sadr could easily follow suit, using his political power to bring down the Maliki government; he could then force the appointment of a more religious or pro-Iranian premier while keeping his troops at the ready in case his demands aren’t met. So far, those demands haven’t included the adoption of sharia, but for now Sadr is still accumulating power. He hasn’t disbanded his militia or put them under the control of Iraq’s central government, raising the specter of renewed political violence after the U.S. withdrawal.

At the moment, Sadr appears to be keeping his options open. In a recent statement, the cleric urged his followers to “halt military operations” until the end of the year to give the U.S. time to withdraw its forces. But he warned that if the withdrawal was delayed for any reason, “The military operations will be resumed in a new and tougher way.” Since rising to prominence in 2003, Sadr has wavered between warrior and politician. His movement’s new direction means he may never have to choose.
This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/iraq-s-moktada-al-sadr-the-trojan-horse–20110922?print=true

By Michael Young , The National, UAE–
Sep 22, 2011

When the time comes to gauge the democratic success or failure of this year’s Arab uprisings, one criterion will be more important than most others: whether the instruments of repression of the old regimes – above all the security services, the army and the police – have been replaced by qualitatively different institutions that respect the rule of law, civilian oversight and human rights.

While much differentiates the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, all have one thing in common in that protesters have sought, or are seeking, to overthrow authoritarian regimes backed up by networks of militarised intimidation. These vary from country to country, which is why organs of repression are often valuable, indeed essential, windows through which to examine a country’s leadership, sociology and political culture.

In Libya, for example, the security services were in the hands of the Qaddafi family and their tribal allies. Favoured units of the Libyan army were controlled by the leader’s sons and were designed to act as a praetorian guard, while other components of the armed forces were left to languish. A similar situation holds in Yemen, where family members of President Ali Abdullah Saleh are in charge of vital military and security branches responsible for regime survival.

In Syria, since the 1960s and 1970s, authority over the military and security agencies has reflected and sustained the rise of the minority Alawite community. At the same time, the Assad regime has used Alawite security and military appointments (like those in the Baath Party) to keep a headlock on the system, guarding against coups and uprisings, and as a source of communal patronage.

A different situation exists in Egypt, where the military and security agencies embody the timeless power of the state. When protesters demanded that President Hosni Mubarak leave office last January, the military command was able to engineer the removal of the man without hastening the collapse of the security edifice that he had supervised. Unlike Syria, Libya and Yemen, where a leader’s departure means the departure of those who managed repression, in Egypt security institutions have remained more or less intact. Mr Mubarak was expendable, as was the former head of military intelligence, Gen Omar Suleiman. And they were expendable precisely to ensure the survival of the system they had dominated.

Central to the motives of those who have taken to the streets throughout the Arab world is an aspiration for freedom and democracy. However, the long-term health of the countries involved and the realisation of their revolutionary potential, will be defined by how repression is exercised after the autocrats. If one repressive order merely replaces another, then little will have been achieved.

What is happening in the societies that have rid themselves of oppressive leaders, or are trying to, is not necessarily encouraging. In Libya, tribalism, regionalism and the divide between Islamists and secularists (and the myriad splits within those categories) make for a devilish brew. The new order will be shaped by the de facto power balance as the war seemingly begins winding down. Who prevails could be determined by the tense interaction between the disparate elements in the transitional authority. This is not ideal for building up accountable security institutions.

In Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has exploited the rifts within the ranks of those who opposed Mr Mubarak to assert its will. Recently, the council expanded the emergency powers introduced during the Mubarak years, representing a significant setback to the high expectations last January. Far from following the lead of the Egyptian government, the supreme council is calling the shots. The most organised opposition force, the Muslim Brotherhood, has also increasingly sided with the military as elections loom, probably in November. All this makes it considerably more difficult to reform, let alone overhaul, the vast Egyptian security apparatus.

In contrast, Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad and his acolytes know there is no middle ground allowing their regime to change while also staying in place. This explains the ferocity with which the Alawite-dominated security services, praetorian divisions of the Syrian army, and irregular militias have crushed mostly peaceful demonstrations. They perceive the challenge to Assad rule as an existential threat to their community, an attitude the regime has hardened to quash all political alternatives. The question is: even if Mr Al Assad is ousted, the more this would this occur? A negotiated exit will more likely facilitate a process placing the security apparatus under civilian authority than if the Assads are removed through violence.

Stalemate in Syria, or in Yemen and in Bahrain, where the standoff of several months ago has not been resolved, is upheld by built-in mechanisms of equilibrium. It is a truism that armed deterrence in most Arab states is primarily directed inward. Arab armies and security services rarely win foreign wars, but until recently they were quite adept at stifling domestic discontent. The regimes did this by balancing interests and patronage, blending coercion with co-optation, neutralising political or social forces apt to undermine the status quo, and securing regional acquiescence for their policies.

Some observers prefer to use the term “Arab revolutions” over “Arab Spring” when describing the transformations in the Middle East and North Africa today. But revolutions frequently devour their own, substituting fresh oppressive orders for those that existed before. Overcoming that foul predisposition will be the benchmark of success in a new Arab world, not vague rhetoric about the allures of liberty.

Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and author of The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle