Al-Sadr Threatens Mahdi Army Revival if US Troops StayPosted on 04/10/2011 by Juan
Al-Hayat writing in Arabic reports that nationalist Shiite clergyman Muqtada al-Sadr threatened on Saturday to revive his Mahdi Army militia if US troops tried to stay in Iraq past December 31, 2011. He said his fighters would return to carrying arms.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi protesters, mainly his supporters, gathered beginning early in the morning on Saturday in Beirut Square and along Palestine Street in Baghdad, in a huge rally to both observe and condemn the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The crowds would likely have been even larger, but Iraqi security forces closed off thoroughfares and bridges leading to the area of the city where the rally was staged. The neighborhood was chosen because a US base is nearby. Protests were also held in other cities in the vicinity of US bases, demanding an immediate departure of the American military.
Rallies were held at the airport in Ninewa Province; in front of the K-1 Air Force base in Kirkuk, before Imam Ali Base in Dhi Qar, which is used by the US Air Force; in Anbar in front of the al-Asad Base, and in Basra at the international airport. Similar sites were targeted for demonstrations in other provinces.
Muqtada’s threat was a shot across the bow of the Obama administration, which has shown interest in recent weeks in maintaining a US military presence in Iraq past the end of this year. Gareth Porter reports that the Obama team has been spooked by the widespread unrest in the Middle East and have reconsidered their determination to get out of Iraq on a short timetable. With a tense and polarized situation in Bahrain after the Saudis sent in troops to support the Sunni monarchy against his majority-Shiite subjects (most of them demanding a constitutional monarchy), the future of the US headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in the Oil Gulf is in doubt. The Arab Shiites of the Gulf are boiling with anger, which could give Shiite Iran an opening to make a bid for greater influence with them. The Obama team seems to think that for the US to abruptly pick up stakes in Iraq at this juncture would threaten the security architecture of the Eastern Arab world and perhaps even the security of petroleum exports from the region, which holds nearly two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves.
Thus, Vice President Joe Biden, who has the Iraq portfolio at the White House, called Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Thursday, apparently to pressure him to extend the US troop presence. The Status of Forces Agreement agreed to by the Iraqi parliament and the Bush administration in fall, 2008, stipulates that all US troops should depart the country by the end of 2011, but allows the Iraqis to request an extension. Washington interprets ‘the Iraqis’ to be the Prime Minister (apparently on analogy to the imperial presidency and the way that Congress has been marginalized in international affairs in the US). Iraqi parliamentarians, however, insist that an extension would have to be agreed to by parliament. The Biden phone call was followed by a visit from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, during which he offered to extend the troop presence but pointed to the short time window within which the request would have to be made. (The US is down to 47,000 or so troops in Iraq and would have to start a steep drawdown soon if there is no extension).
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