a new struggle is beginning in iraq:
‘The Shia are the majority in Iraq and the Sadrists are a majority of this majority,’ a former Shia minister told me. ‘They make up 30 to 40 per cent of the total Iraqi population.’ The population of Iraq is 27 million: on this ex-minister’s calculation, up to ten million of them support Muqtada.
(...) The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and the militias but between rich and poor.
(...) As the Iraqi army started to advance in Basra at the end of March it became clear that Maliki’s offensive was targeted solely against the Mehdi Army. It did not touch the other two main militias in Basra, the Badr Organisation and Fadhila, a Sadrist splinter group powerful in the oilfields. Iraqis were not persuaded by Maliki’s argument that his aim was to eliminate criminal gangs in Basra. Banditry is obviously rife: a businessman friend told me that, to move a container from Umm Qasr port near Basra to Arbil in northern Iraq, he had recently paid $500 in transport fees and $3000 in bribes. Given that government officials in Baghdad seldom do anything without a bribe, Maliki’s claim that he would end criminality in Basra was never going to be convincing.
(...) By this time, American generals and politicians were saying that they had known nothing about Maliki’s disastrous offensive until the last minute -- conveniently forgetting that the Americans had been urging Iraqi prime ministers to attack the Mehdi Army since 2004.