[Wall Street Journal] Dan Senor - During his trip to Washington earlier this week, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki again failed to condemn Hizballah and instead focused exclusively on the "destruction that happened to the Lebanese people as a result of the military air and ground attacks." Maliki - who is competent, tough, and genuinely committed to a democratic Iraq - is responding to pressure from radical Shiites in his own country. Moqtada al-Sadr and his Sadrists, the Sadriyyun, are as powerful and destructive as ever, forcing the prime minister's hand on Israel and other issues. Sadr's militia, the Mehdi army, has been responsible for a considerable share of Iraq's sectarian strife, not to mention the deaths of American soldiers in 2003 and 2004. His power is derived from a combination of family lineage, violent intimidation of rival clerics, and agitation on behalf of Iraq's Shiite underclass. Both the Sadriyyun and Hizballah are funded by Tehran, and both represent the same ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic demographic within their respective countries. And much like Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in southern Lebanon, Moqtada al-Sadr has tried to establish a state within a state inside Iraq. Both Nasrallah and Sadr have dual-tracked political strategies: While they seek to establish their own autonomous governing structures, they also influence the national political process by electing allies to the parliament and bargaining for appointments to ministerial posts. While 12 Hizballah loyalists now sit in Lebanon's parliament (as well as two ministers), over 30 self-identified Sadrists are members of Iraq's 275-seat National Assembly. The writer was based in Baghdad as an adviser to the Bush administration from April 2003 to June 2004.
2006-07-27 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive