WASHINGTON, July 2 (UPI) -- U.S. forces in Baghdad are back on a collision course with pro-Iranian firebrand Moqtada Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia. Worse yet, that conflict could embroil them with the wider Shiite community -- the 60 percent majority in Iraq.
On Saturday, U.S. forces killed 26 Shiites in Sadr City, the huge, sprawling complex of poor neighborhoods that is overwhelmingly Shiite and that houses 2.5 million people. For years, it has been Sadr's stronghold in the Iraqi capital of up to 7 million people.
The U.S. military said the 26 killed were armed gunmen firing at U.S. forces. Some residents told Western correspondents that at least eight of them were unarmed civilians. But in terms of the likely effect on radicalizing the population of Sadr City against U.S. forces, the details are immaterial. What matters is the rage against supposed U.S. "invaders" of Sadr City that can be expected to spread across Baghdad.
U.S. forces have been concentrated in Baghdad under the "surge" strategy of coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus in order to try and protect the Shiite community especially from the onslaughts of Sunni insurgents.
The "surge", as we have often noted in these columns, has had some success in suppressing the random killings by both Shiite and Sunni militias in the Iraqi capital. But it has manifestly failed to even reduce, let alone end, the continual onslaught of Sunni insurgent bombings, many of them suicide attacks, killing hundreds of innocent Shiite civilians.
Now, by enraging the Shiite population they were ostensibly deployed to protect, U.S. commanders and their political overlords in Washington may themselves have driven the last nail into the coffin of the "surge" strategy.
Back on May 1, 2003, the same day U.S. President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq on the decks of the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, we warned in these columns that the guerrilla war was only about to start in Iraq; that it would be comparable, if not worse, in intensity and scale than the long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland had been; and that U.S. military's casualties would certainly be far higher in that conflict than those suffered during the rapid March-April 2003 drive on Baghdad. Every one of those predictions has long since come true.
We made those predictions because of the firefight that U.S. troops had won a few days before in the Sunni Muslim town of Fallujah. We compared the 16 young Sunni Iraqis killed in that incident with the 13 unarmed people killed by British paratroopers on so-called "Bloody Sunday" in Belfast back in 1972. Within months, the conflict in Northern Ireland had escalated into the bloodiest guerrilla wars Europe had seen since the end of World War II. Since then, on the European continent, only the Bosnian and Croatian conflicts with the Serbs have been worse.
The latest fighting in Sadr City carries even greater potential dangers for the U.S. forces that were trying to suppress Sadr's men. The American troops were supposedly acting on behalf of the democratically elected Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Yet Maliki lost no time in condemning the U.S. forces, not the militia they were fighting.
Back on April 9, we expressed our skepticism of the then-prevailing wisdom in the Bush administration and the U.S. Department of Defense that Sadr's militia was suppressed, dispirited and splintering with many of its top leaders already having fled to Iran to avoid apprehension as part of the bold new U.S. surge strategy.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on his return from his fifth visit to Iraq, expressed this wisdom in an op-ed in The Washington Post earlier in April when he claimed that Sadr's supporters "are not contesting American forces."
Unfortunately for McCain, the very same edition of the paper in which his column appeared also contained a news article entitled "U.S. Fights Iraqi Militia in South."
Back on March 12, we warned in these columns, "If the United States launches major air strikes against the nuclear facilities in neighboring Iran, then Iran's Revolutionary Guards look certain to use their massive clout with the Mehdi Army, and with other Shiite militias, to get them to cut off cooperation with U.S. forces in Iraq and to attack the Americans instead.
"In that eventuality, U.S. forces in Iraq could find themselves in a nightmarish, chaotic situation, fighting different enemies at the same time. They certainly could not count on the loyalty of the Iraqi security forces, which Iraq's own government has admitted have been infiltrated by up to as many as 100,000 men with militia -- mostly Shiite -- links."
On April 9, we pointed out that the tacit support of the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias was crucial to the success of Gen. Petraeus' "spreading ink blots of security" strategy to secure Baghdad against the Sunni insurgents operating there.
The more U.S. forces clash with Sadr, the more they run the risk of alienating wider elements of the Shiite community as well, as Maliki's tough talk about Saturday's violence indicates. But U.S. forces in Iraq are neither numerous enough, nor are they appropriately deployed, to react quickly and effectively against a broad Shiite uprising against them. They still have their hands full struggling with the Sunni insurgency.
The new clashes with the Mahdi Army are therefore strategically far more important than the real but limited tactical successes U.S. forces are enjoying against Sunni guerrillas in the Baquba region. There are three times as many Shiites in Iraq as Sunnis, and Baquba is not remotely as important as Baghdad. Washington policymakers need to remember those two elementary facts.
