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From the Belmont Club:

Monday, March 31, 2008--- After the Surge

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About three days ago, when the clash between the Iraqi Army and the Madhi army was in its fourth day, I asked a senior officer returned from Iraq after his presentation whether Maliki would go all the way against Sadr. He said he didn't know, but added that militias were a problem that had to be eventually addressed. Another questioner asked about the quality of the Iraqi Armed forces, and on this point the answer was more definite. The quality was uneven. Many parts of it were rudimentary; some parts of it were extraordinarily good.

But the subject of the talk that night on the strategic history of the campaign in Iraq provided the perfect background to understand how the fight with the Mahdi Army might develop.

Maliki's campaign against the Mahdi Army carries many echoes of the two Battles of Fallujah; with the First Fallujah bearing an extraordinary superficial resemblance to the events -- so far. Like the First Fallujah, Maliki's campaign against the Mahdi Army appears to have begun suddenly, just as the plan to reduce that city was sparked by the unanticipated massacre of a contractor convoy by Sunni insurgents. Like the First Fallujah, the campaign against Sadr has reached a non-binding truce, with Moqtada al-Sadr ordering his men to stop operations. Like the First Fallujah, the truce is really a sham. A half dozen mortar rounds fell again on the Green Zone right after the so-called "truce" was declared. Like the First Fallujah the enemy is claiming political victory, with the New York Times in particular claiming glowing Sadrist victories against US troops who "opened fire randomly in a crazy way and shot many people". Yet like the First Fallujah the current operations are likely to have been a military disaster for enemy forces. Bill Roggio reports that Sadr's men have been decimated by operations, which have been conducted largely by the Iraqi Army.

But the similarities to the First Fallujah, go even deeper. Both operations against were conducted against an enemy in an "unshaped battlefield", meaning one which had not been previously emptied of civilians. The extraordinary interaction between political and military events in Iraq was captured in the adage around MNF-I (according to the senior officer's presentation) to 'fight to the politics'.

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