The militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has declared a unilateral cease-fire with U.S. forces in the Baghdad district of Sadr City and has offered to help police ensure safety in the area, a statement said Friday....The declaration said the cease-fire was called to show al-Sadr's interest in preventing "terrorists and saboteurs" from "causing overwhelming chaos or security disorder." The militia offered "to actively contribute and positively cooperate with the honest parties in Iraqi police and the national forces" in order to secure the "safety of institutions, Iraqi state buildings and government buildings" as well as water, power, fuel and refineries.
There's no way to tell how sincere a murderous upstart like Muqtada al-Sadr could possibly be at this point, or how far his orders actually extend to the disorganized gangs that once made up his street muscle. But old Mookie sings sweetly today, motivation for the statement being two swollen black eyes, his political and paramilitary standing utterly smashed by Iraq's Shiite communities and Allied soldiers, respectively. With barely enough men now to put together a football club with special teams and a presidential attraction below the most hated man in Iraq, the defeated al-Sadr is talking cooperation. He does the right thing because he knows that if he doesn't, he eventually gets thumped.
The hard lesson here is the one the United States learned and — perhaps out of a forgivable, naïve gentleness — soon forgot after every victorious 20th-Century war: authoritarian cultures and those who excel in them are most open to change when they are left in ruin, when the lies of power through force are exposed, when democratic progress is the only hand up out of the pit. Know it as "creative destruction," the often heartbreaking but necessary actions democracies have been and will be taking for decades to secure the rapidly modernizing world from concentrated tyranny and evil. We see that the Fallujah experiment has only affected the hearts — and not the even actions — of the city people who never meant much harm to the Allies or a free Iraq in the first place, and that the old smuggler-city is the command center for bin Laden apprentice Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's last stand. The Iranian gambit via al-Sadr as it was first intended is finished, a failure. Fallujah's time has come. Though the risks of greater loss of life than seen in months haven't lessened, the final stronghold of authoritarian resistance in Iraq, a panoply of secular and fundamentalist representatives — each faction pretending to serve its own higher cause but really only servicing the imbecile's teaching of Cain — must be destroyed, its leaders killed and its lesser followers scattered and drawn into civil society. Iraq will ever be in jeopardy, stuck as only half-right, until this is done.
