Reply #11: more from juan cole, WP radio interview

[paulk]

question:

Washington, D.C.: What's with the recent rash of 'experts' and talking heads, who are calling Sadr a thug and are advocating to crush his movement? From everything that I've read, Sadr's only crime was to protest corruption in Allawi's government and demand justice for his people. Why can't they just leave Sadr alone?

Maybe the 'Mehdi' army doesn't want to give up their weapons; because if they do, Allawi and his thugs will kill Sadr the very next day.



Juan Cole: It is not impossible for all these assertions to be true. Muqtada does have thug-like tendencies. He enjoys having an "army" at his command, and using it to take turf and intimidate enemies. All the Grand Ayatollahs and their staffs have been harassed by his goons.

His "Mahdi Army" has firebombed liquor and video stores and harassed women who were not all covered up, and generally acted in an aggressive way to impose their puritanism on other Iraqis who don't want it. At one point they attacked a gypsy village and destroyed it, as a den of iniquity. They are vigilantes in spirit, and are incompatible with a healthy civil society in which politics is a matter of persuasion and public decision-making.

On the other hand, it is probably true that if he had actually disbanded his militia and left himself defenseless, Muqtada would have been arrested by the Marines the next day. There were Arabic press reports of US military attempts to capture him in the couple of weeks before the outbreak of the most recent fighting.

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