What Really Happened in Basra?
April 7th, 2008 at 12:16am Mark Noonan
Jack Kelly tells the story:
The Mahdi army has won by surviving, media analysts say. But it seems apparent the Mahdi army survived by quitting.
Mr. al Sadr offered the cease fire after travelled to Iran to meet with the head of the Qods (Jerusalem) force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the McClatchy Newspapers reported. The lawmakers urged Brigadier Gen. Qassem Suliemani to lean on Mr. al Sadr (who is in Iran) to offer the cease fire.
If true (Mr. Kazimi’s government source in Baghdad described it as a “naive fabrication”), the McClatchy story indicates the Mahdi army is under Iranian control.
Why would Iran want the fighting to stop?
“The Iranians have realized that they no longer can use the Shiite militia threat to force Washington’s hand on Iraq without jeopardizing their own interests,” speculated STRATFOR, a private intelligence service.
Fighting among Shia factions, and the increasing independence of Shia factions they thought they controlled has virtually dashed hopes Iran would be able to dominate Iraq through Shia proxies, STRATFOR said.
“The mullahs know that they are losing,” said Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. “Their great dream of driving America out of Iraq, which seemed to be about to be fulfilled just a year and a half ago, has now turned into the nightmare of humiliation and defeat for the Islamic republic. The Maliki government is attacking the remnants of the Mahdi army in Basra, that same government the mullahs thought they had under control.”
One of my theories about what had triggered the intense fighting in Basra was that the Iranians had decided to try a spasm of violence as a means of recovering lost politico-military ground. Unfortunately, the miscalculated the Iraqi-American response, got whacked, and now have had to call off the dogs in hopes of salvaging at least some of their influence in Iraq. And so much for the lefty concept that Iraq was becoming a stooge of Iranian interests. Seems that Iraqis want to govern themselves - religious affinity is all fine and dandy, but just because most Americans and most Brazilians are Christian, it doesn’t mean that either nation wishes to be governed by the other…and so it is with Iraq and Iran; same religion, but different peoples who want a lot of different things (one of the more notable being that Iraqis don’t want to voluntarily enslave themselves to Iranian mullahs who govern with corruption and cruelty).
While the MSM will maintain the fiction for as long as possible that Sadr won in Basra, the facts indicate that the Iraqi government and military passed their first stern test on the road to being fully self-sufficient, and put a huge dent in the pretensions not just of Sadr, but of all wanna-be warlords.
Entry Filed under: War on Terror
11 Comments
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3. Dennis | April 7th, 2008 at 2:57 am
Mark, it’s funny how you cling to discredited sources support your worldview. First of all you cite Jack Kelly. Would this be the same Jack Kelley (with a spelling variant) we remember from USAToday?
Here’s a story from USAToday from March 19, 2004:
Ex-USA TODAY reporter faked major stories
By Blake Morrison,USA TODAY
Seven weeks into an examination of former USA TODAY reporter Jack Kelley’s work, a team of journalists has found strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work… an extensive examination of about 100 of the 720 stories uncovered evidence that found Kelley’s journalistic sins were sweeping and substantial… Kelley’s conduct represents “a sad and shameful betrayal of public trust,” former newspaper editors Bill Hilliard, Bill Kovach and John Seigenthaler said in a statement…
http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-03-18-2004-03-18_kelleymain_x.htm
Next, what do you really know about Stratfor? Did you know that George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, ascended to success based on his 1991 book “The Coming War With Japan”, which concluded the US would soon be involved in a shooting war with Japan, and should ally itself with North Korea? That’s one credential you sure as hell won’t see advertised in any of Stratfor’s marketing materials. see
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0312058365
BRIAN LAMB: George Friedman, co-author of “The Coming War with Japan,” what’s it all about?
GEORGE FRIEDMAN: Well, as the title says pretty bluntly, the idea that the United States and Japan are going to have a conflict; that in the same way that the Soviet-American conflict dominated the last two generations, the U.S.-Japanese conflict is going to dominate at least the next one.
LAMB: Meredith LeBard, do you really believe this?
MEREDITH LEBARD: I certainly do, especially after spending all the time we spent researching and writing the book…
LAMB: When you say “the coming war,” is it a shooting war?
FRIEDMAN: Yes. I mean, the shape of that shooting war — whether it’s going to be an all-out battle for the Pacific as the first U.S.-Japanese war was or a surrogate Cold War where we back different sides in various clashes, that’s very difficult to predict — but certainly an overwhelming political conflict between two major powers for domination of the Pacific Basin. Our basic argument is that you do not have trade wars that are confined to trade wars. The economic conflicts the U.S. and Japan are having now are the preface to some much deeper conflicts — conflicts that have been present for the past century in the Pacific Basin.
__________________
Yeah, whatever. Okay, enough of that foolishness. As for Michael Ledeen, fan of Italian fascism, here’s a gem from his intellectual jewel box:
“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”
see http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html
You’re only as good as your sources. As you aptly demonstrate over and over, your head is buried deeply in the sands of utopianism. Any evidence, no matter how concrete, that your theories are bogus just doesn’t register. You have no gray matter with which to deal with plain facts.
So you cite discredited sources - it’s all you have to bolster your refutation of manifest reality.
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5. Dennis | April 7th, 2008 at 3:56 am
Okay, Mark - I’m withdrawing my question regarding Jack Kelly. After my prior post I did more checking and found Jack Kelly and Jack Kelley are in fact different people. see http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0404/jkelly042204.asp
I felt it important to make a case for accuracy (something often lacking on your side) and I apologize for jumping the gun.
But my larger point stands - the Jack Kelly you cited still relies on questionable sources for his conclusions. Stratfor is a very expensive source of “actionable intelligence” for corporate clients and its founder earned his chops not by accurate political forecasting, but clever marketing. The material posted above on George Friedman is factual.
The Bush administration’s standards of “actionable intelligence” are little better than Friedman’s original forecasts regarding Japan, and Ledeen’s position remains that the mullahs are losing.
I give greater credibility to Juan Cole, who finds, “Neither the US nor Britain any longer has good intelligence on what is happening in the slums of Basra. If Petraeus is getting his information from al-Maliki on all this, he should be careful. The Da’wa and ISCI are perfectly capable of doing propaganda to embroil the US in their fights. In fact, their lies helped draw the US in, in the first place.
“The US Institute of Peace concluded in a just-released report that there has been little political progress in Iraq, and that the US risks, as a result, being bogged down there for 5 to 10 years. If critics of the US presence are correct, having so many US troops in Iraq may actually be delaying the compromises that Iraqis desperately need to make with one another. As it is, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki knows that he can just have the US Air Force bomb his enemies; he doesn’t need to come to an agreement with them.”
And that is hardly a favorable premise for Iraq having “passed their first stern test on the road to being fully self-sufficient.”
6. Mark Noonan | April 8th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Dennis,
The US Institute for Peace isn’t exactly an unscotchable source, either. As it is, common sense and easily ascertainable fact (ie, that Sadr asked for a cease fire, and Maliki hasn’t agreed to one) indicate that the quote article is at least largely correct.
7. Dennis | April 8th, 2008 at 2:45 am
The difference, Mark, is that Juan Cole has long been a Middle East scholar and his quote can be cross-referenced with other reputable sources. I’ve essentially read the same report in more depth from about five different directions today. Cole is usually ahead of the curve and very rarely wrong.
Whereas your guy Kelly is no authority on the Middle East but a right-wing ideologue, and his sources all lean the same way.
You really ought to seek out sources who know what they’re talking about - it would raise your credibility a notch or two, which this blog could really use. But somehow I get the feeling you really aren’t interested in accuracy, just loud partisan banging on pots and pans…
8. Mark Noonan | April 8th, 2008 at 2:48 am
Uh, really? I’d be hard pressed to find even one thing Cole has ever been right about…he’s a leftwing hack who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it…
9. Freedom1 | April 8th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Good grief. Juan Cole has zero credibility. Less than zero, actually.
10. Christian Wright | April 8th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Things are so bad in Iraq that, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony of Lt. General Willam E Odom, Vice President Chaney has aligned himself with al Qaeda. That’s right. He has the people the brought down the WTC on the US payroll.
See the link.
www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/06/8114/
11. Tractatus | April 8th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I’d be hard pressed to find even one thing Cole has ever been right about…he’s a leftwing hack who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it…
In other words, he’s smarter than you, has a far better track record than you when it comes to understanding Iraq, and tends to undercut your preferred narrative, and all of that really gets your goat.
You shouldn’t let your jealousy show like that, Noonan.