Choose 2 (or more): Lawyers, Guns and Money

By Dave Anderson:

The crew at the Newshoggers have consistently believed that the Sadrists are one of the most important and resilient political forces in Iraq.  They have local legitimacy and can take the occasional beat down from the US military without it impacting its core existance and power.  Steve outlined the reason for the basic Sadrist legitimacy last March when the right-wing in the US had to deal with the fact that the Sadrists were not quite dead yet and were the swing bloc in any government formation talks:

for the same reasons all those claims of Mookie's demise were wrong: the Sadrist movement isn't just a militia, it is a social organization on the model of Hizboullah which has often been the only organising force and provider of basic services on the scene for millions of Iraqis, especially when the rest of the nation was descending into chaos no matter what the central government did.

However, the more long-term minded of foreign policy commentators might want to consider what lessons could be derived regarding the various Pakistani and Afghan Taliban factions, likewise religiously fundementalist militia movements that provide the only effective security, government, law and social services for large segments of population at a time when the central government either cannot compete or is unable to provide those services at all.

Swopa at Needlenose reexamined some of the government formation talks and sees that the Sadrists have played a very adroit hand in that they have sidelined one of their largest competitors for power in the Shi'ite bloc as well as cementing their institutional hold on hard power.

ISCI and the Sadrists have had a feud that dates to before the U.S. invasion and has erupted into violence on several occasions since 2003, usually in regard to ISCI�s control of key Muslim shrines in Najaf and Karbala.  In fact, Maliki came to power as an unknown in 2006 due to Moqtada�s determination to keep the prime minister�s job from going to� Adel Abdel-Mahdi of ISCI.

That history appears to be repeating itself now.  Because, with Sadr�s supposedly secured backing, Abdel-Mahdi and ISCI went hat in hand to other major factions (Iyad Allawi and the Kurdish parties) looking for further support in deposing Maliki � only to have the Sadrists go back to the prime minister and cut a deal that threw ISCI under the bus, leaving their powerful ministries (ISCI had been in charge of the army, police, and finance ministries since the 2005 elections) up for grabs.

The Sadrists look like they will get a major security ministry (either the national police or the military) as well as either the oil ministry or the finance ministry.  SIIC/SCIRI/ISCI/Badr (AKA the Iranian pensioners) had used their control of the official security structure to beat up on the Sadrists and the JAM (the Sadrist militia which effectively ethnically cleansed Baghdad by mid-2007.  The JAM has no need to exist if the Sadrists control a significant portion of the state's capacity for violence.  If the Sadrist get one of the two cash-cow ministries, they'll regain their hammerlock on Iraqi finances that they lost when the Sadrists were beaten in Basra. 

So for a group that in serious conversation is a spent force, the Sadrists sure as hell seem to continually be coming out ahead.