Al-Sadr’s new challenge to the US: Non-violence

The Iranians have been whipping the US in the Iraq political warfare game since the early weeks of the 2003 liberation, and now it looks like their main Iraqi ally, Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is becoming much more sophisticated in how he hogties the Americans and the Iraqi government.

Having ordered his Mahdi Army to lay low during the new US troop surge, al-Sadr is now backing unarmed protests against the US and the government in Baghdad. If this tactic becomes part of his overall strategy, we could see non-terroristic – even non-violent – Shi’ite Islamist militancy become a new weapon.

The restrictive American rules of engagement in Iraq allow the enemy plenty of operational leeway. They let the enemy fairly predict where and how it can operate without fear of coming under fire. The rules of engagement give the Mahdi Army and other terrorist groups remarkable freedom of movement in Baghdad and elsewhere as long as their members are not overtly armed, are not acting in an immediately threatening manner, and do not engage in violence. 

What better opportunity for them to engage in propagandistic “martyr” operations than to organize, march and protest non-violently – and either provoke or stage made-for-TV attacks on themselves and on innocent Iraqis in their midst.

Such incidents promise to generate mass revulsion against the Iraqi government and US forces – and the US will be powerless to do much about it. (Unless it ramps up its information operations capability as quickly as the Mahdi Army is adapting to the surge.)

Update, April 9: Thousands of Iraqi Shi’ites answer al Sadr’s call to protest US