Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [290]
But Bremer was not inclined to work through the tribes. Despite his agreement to turn over sovereignty by June, it remained difficult to get him to accept the idea that Iraq belonged to the Iraqis, and that the Iraqis were entitled to their own culture and institutions.
In the spring of 2004, we faced the danger of a two-front insurgency. Sunni insurgents were gaining ground and establishing sanctuaries in Iraq’s west, in places like Fallujah. Meanwhile, Shia militias, under Muqtada al-Sadr, were threatening rebellion in the south. The son of a revered ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam’s lieutenants, Sadr demonstrated little of his father’s intellectual prowess. As a failing seminary student, he had earned the nickname “Mullah Atari” in recognition of his fondness for video games. Yet he developed a following and became a powerful and violent leader of opposition to the American occupation. His angry sermons drew flocks of young men from Shia slums, enabling him to establish a militia that gained influence through a combination of social services and mob terror. Sadr intimidated other Iraqis by being able to put thousands of thugs and young males on the street. These mobs, called the Mahdi Army (though it was in no sense an army), were a potent force for disruption, demonstrations, and terror.
That April, long-simmering tensions with Sadr came to a head in Najaf, Iraq’s holiest Shia city. Taking advantage of the Fallujah flare-up, Shia gangs heeded Sadr’s call, televised on Al-Jazeera, to attack coalition forces throughout southern Iraq.28 Sadr had established his own Islamic courts and prisons in Najaf—the heart of the Shiite clerical establishment—where eyewitness accounts reported torture in the style of Saddam’s regime.29
There were several discussions in the National Security Council about whether, and if so when, our forces should take Sadr into custody. As early as August 2003 I had recommended that Abizaid and Bremer begin to think through “what we are going to do if red lines are crossed.”30 When Sadr began calling the coalition “the enemy,” I felt he had crossed the line.31 If he wanted to define us as his enemy, my view was that we should treat him as one. He had evidently ordered the murder of one of Iraq’s most respected moderate Shia leaders, Abdul Majid al-Khoei. I felt it was important to establish the principle that no one—not even a cleric with the loyalty of tens of thousands of Shia—should be above the law. In January 2004, I recommended that the CPA arrest Sadr to demonstrate “that the rule of law applies to Shi’a as well as Sunni.”32
But there was another legitimate consideration that preoccupied us. Arresting Sadr risked making him even more popular, and could further inflame tensions with the Shia majority, possibly triggering an outright civil war. When Sadr was holed up in the holy city of Najaf, for example, several senior clerics who opposed him nonetheless argued strongly against storming the city to arrest him. They feared it would aggravate sectarian tensions and damage holy sites.33 Still, my view was to arrest the demagogue.
Since this was a decision that could have a significant impact on the relationship between the coalition and our Iraqi allies, the President concluded that Bremer had to decide the best course to take. As coalition forces surrounded Najaf, Bremer and Sanchez decided to let the Iraqis take action on their own to deal with