by Patrick Cockburn (Faber, £16.99)
In late August 2004, I found myself among about 2,000 poor Shia Iraqis in the ancient mosque at Kufa, near Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad. The second siege of Najaf—the first had been in April—was winding down after three weeks of intense fighting. The Kufa mosque had been struck by an American missile a few days earlier, outraging Shia believers across the world. Just inside the mosque's entrance was a pile of the shoes of dead fighters. In the small office where I had taken refuge on a floor, a couple of dozen young men slumped next to me against the walls, bloodied, dusty and weary. A young mullah, lean and handsome—like many of Muqtada al-Sadr's youthful lieutenants—played with the tail-fin of a mortar with a hand wrapped in a bloody bandage as he drew me diagrams of the battle with a finger on a dusty table.
My sanctuary inside the mosque was frightening enough for an American reporter with little Arabic. When I went outside to look for my translator and driver, I was even more scared, as angry crowds swirled about. But no one tried to hurt me in that wild couple of hours. American and European civilians in Iraq during the last five years have almost always felt safer in Shia regions and neighbourhoods than in Sunni ones.
It was al Qaeda and the Baathists, the two principal Sunni sources of violence in Iraq, who kidnapped and beheaded foreigners. The Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr, the only Shia group to fight the coalition head on, rarely kidnapped foreigners, and invariably freed them when they did. Even Mahdi army splinter groups beyond the control of the al-Sadr hierarchy could usually be prevailed upon by Muqtada's office to free their captives. One soon learned that the bombers who claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians were invariably Sunni. These nuances of violence taught a foreign observer the emerging truths of Iraq's politics in a most visceral way.
The story of Iraq over the last five years is one not of US and British soldiers with all their failures, successes and tragedies. It is the story of Iraqis and the realignment of their politics after 30 years of Baathism. It is the story of Iraq becoming a Shia country. The biggest surprise, and possibly the most potent force, to emerge in this process has been al-Sadr.
In his latest book, Muqtada, Iraq's best reporter has now told the most important story in Iraq. Cockburn provides an extremely useful account of the al-Sadr movement's mixed origins in the injustice-obsessed, millenarian theology of Shiism, in the Iraqi Shia urge to resist the domination of the faith's Iranian aristocratic hierarchy, and in the three decades of anti-Shia depredations of the Baath party. Few among today's Iraq reporters have the sophistication to tell such a tale. Cockburn has erudition, long-standing experience of Mesopotamia, and elegance of mind and pen to complement a high level of physical bravery.
After a slew of forgettable memoirs by journalists, diplomats and soldiers (Oliver Poole's recent Red Zone, a well-informed and compassionate memoir, is a notable exception), it is a relief to find an Iraq book that is not self-absorbed, naive or over-dramatic. This war has been marked by three characteristics from the reporter's point of view: it is far more dangerous than any other has ever been (200 journalists have died since the invasion just over five years ago), it is drearily bereft of compensations in the evening, and it has not produced literature of lasting merit.
A fourth characteristic can be added to this list. Iraq reporting is dominated by a highly editorial approach, almost all of it from the anti-American left. Cockburn is the dean of this school of thought too. It is a field of endeavour that was more or less invented by his father, the communist writer Claud Cockburn, and which has been carried on by Patrick and his two talented brothers, Alexander and Andrew. Patrick is a proud polemicist of the old-fashioned, sceptical-of-American-power strain, perhaps the leading light in a family who are the Kennedys or Bushes of the ink-stained, well-heeled intellectual left.
It is a noble tradition and, in Cockburn's hands, a charming and glamourous one, but it is also as wrong about Iraq as it was about the cold war. If our leaders had listened to it, Saddam Hussein would have been in power for another 20 years and Iraqis would not possess the possibility of liberty that is theirs today. If this tendency had any predictive power beyond the truism that Iraq tomorrow will be violent, the country's three nationwide democratic exercises in 2005 would have been terrible failures, rather than popular successes, and the country would have fallen apart in the leaderless "civil war" of 2006 and the first half of 2007. If we had followed the counsels of this illiberal school, a courageous and important nation of 25m souls would have been abandoned to al Qaeda, the Baathists and Iran a year ago or more.
Nonetheless, Cockburn's book is by far the most useful that has been written about post-Saddam Iraq, and fortunately its focus is on internal Iraqi matters—an area where western philosophical disputes are mostly irrelevant. Muqtada evokes the sense of class war and anti-Persian nationalism that colours the al-Sadr faction's conflict with the traditional Shia hierarchy of Najaf, and grasps the weird, semi-mystical tone of the movement and the way in which Muqtada, his martyred father and his father-in-law seem to melt into a single personality. And yet, Cockburn aptly argues, Muqtada, "for all his messianic rhetoric and white martyr's shroud, is a cautious man." Far from being a crazed neophyte, he is an experienced, canny player. Cockburn has discovered that Muqtada was already running his father's political office in Najaf aged 19. (Although it would have been useful to have a bit more on the "Mullah Atari" school of thought, which holds that Muqtada is a thuggish dolt addicted to video games.)
Muqtada earned his status partly as an heir to his family's populist legacy, but also as the only popular leader of a major Iraqi tendency to stand up and fight the US-led coalition. Now al-Sadr is fighting his own government. But the notable theme in the violence of March and early April was not the imperfections of Iraq's fledgling army. (A year ago, the Iraqi government would not have had the confidence to confront al-Sadr at all, much less to take the port of Basra and most of the second city's neighbourhoods from the militias.) Instead, what was really remarkable about the recent flare-up of violence was the accommodating figure cut by al-Sadr. Throughout the storming of his neighbourhoods in Basra and-Sadr City, he reaffirmed his commitment to the ceasefire that he renewed in late February. His men, not Maliki's, were ordered to withdraw from the field of battle, and Maliki's men patrol the streets of Basra today. After a week of fighting, Muqtada called not for an uprising but for a peaceful street demonstration, which was cancelled by the government without a whimper from al-Sadr. And from where did al-Sadr make his accommodating announcements? Tehran, where he was based throughout the writing of Muqtada, and where he will be for another few years at least as he completes a hasty degree that will allow him to claim status as a mujtahid, or source of reference and emulation for Shias. Muqtada is not an Iranian pawn, or has not been to date, but his taking refuge there from his own elected government is already proving politically damaging. The al-Sadr movement is about nationalism as much as it is about populism. Tehran and Qom are good places to lose that mantle.
The situation today is that Muqtada remains in Iran and in the Iraqi government. His representatives are still in parliament and in the five important ministries they control. The Iraqi administration, meanwhile, has shown that it can take him on without fear of chaos, uprising or civil war. In a year's time, the balance of violent power will have tilted even more in the security services' favour. The trajectory is clear.
Muqtada has recently achieved what even the Americans failed to: a brief alignment of almost all of Iraq's main political parties. The Sunni parties, both Kurdish parties, many leading secularists and the two main old Shia parties all lined up behind the government in its standoff with al-Sadr. Bloodied by an unpopular government, hemmed in, pushed out of lucrative real estate during the battles of March and April, Muqtada is fortunate to have recourse to the ballot box in local elections this autumn and national elections in 2009. We know who he has to thank for that.
