Casey Sheehan, the Shiite Revolt, and the Future of Iraq

[alcibiades_mystery]

or, One or Many Wolves

In their monumental work of contemporary philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (vol. 2), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari take Freud to task for reducing all psychological phenomena to the family triad, the Mommy-Daddy-Me constellation. In a particularly funny passage, they remark on Freud's astounding stubbornness on this question in his analysis of patient known as the Wolf Man. The Wolf Man, you see, wants to tell Freud about the wolves who watch him, but Freud struggles to reduce this back to the family: the wolves, for Freud, are the family dog, and isn't this really about the Law of the Father? Deleuze and Guattari spit up laughing. Every child knows wolves travel in packs, they say, but not Freud. Freud must reduce any wild pack to the domesticated One, because the complexity of packs would strip the self of its stable reference point. Every child knows that wolves travel in packs. Not Freud.

The day that Casey Sheehan died in Iraq was a day of terror and bloodshed across the country. It was the first day of the Shi'a uprising of 2004, and it came with a vengeance. On April 4, 2004, seven Americans, including Sheehan, were killed in Sadr City clashes with followers of Moqtada al-Sadr; twenty-four more were wounded. Just days before, the Coalition Provisional Authority had raided Sadr's newspaper offices and declared Sadr an outlaw, sparking "a series of bloody clashes that erupted across Iraq," and culminating in the bloody battle of Najaf, in the shadow of the most sacred mosque in Shi'a culture, with US Marines locked in close ground combat with Mehdi Army militias onn top of one of the world's largest cemetery's - the space between the living and the dead reduced to meters, and closing. The men who killed Casey Sheehan were not the tribal Sunnis who kill Americans in Ramadi, Baiji, Baquba, Fallujah, Mosul. No. They were radical Shi'a in Sadr City. There are many wolves in this pack.

So why did Casey Sheehan die? At the very general level, we all know the answers to this - the answers that Bush cannot face, that he flees from. We can recite them by rote. But even at the very specific level, the answers are stark, perhaps more stark and disturbing than the general answers. For at the general level, Sheehan died for Bush's lies, greed, and ambition. But at the specific level, he died in an effort to divest the Shi'a radicals from their place in the Iraqi government. And that has been a monumental failure.

The assault on al-Sadr's group, as I see it, was meant to de-radicalize the Shi'a, whom the Coalition Provisional Authority naturally saw as holding the lion share of votes in any Iraqi government. They were right about that. But in order to avoid the obvious problem of turning the lion share of Iraq into a greater Iran, the CPA had to attack Shi'a "radicalism," where "radical" is defined as any group more willing to enter into partnership with the Iranians. Enter Moqtada al-Sadr, and his thousands under arms. This group must have been terrifying to US strategic planning, so first the newspaper was raided, then US military forces spent the better part of 2004 battling the Medhi Army on the ground. The official version is that the US prevailed, disbanding Sadr's forces after the Battle of Najaf, and elevating the supposedly more moderate al-Sistani to spiritual leader. But this is a dubious story indeed, given the apparent privileges that the most conservative Shiite elements have arrogated to themselves in the process and on the ground. The more disturbing story might be that al-Sadr actually won his months-long fight with the Americans, not on the battlefield, but more generally.

Could it be that the pitched battles which disbanded the Mehdi actually served to convince the Americans that Shi'a radicalism couldn't be stamped out easily? And don't we see the influence of these same forces on the Constitutional process? That is to say, Casey Sheehan died during a bid to suppress a brand of Shi'a from entering into the governmental process, but that brand has successfully entered, and will shape the future of Iraq. Even at the specific level, then, Sheehan's death - and the deaths of the other troops that fought the Mehdi Army - was needless, and unproductive.

I start with the story of Freud's Wolf Man in order to encourage us to look at the details as well. In this case, the details are the complex pak of insurgencies - not one but many insurgencies, all with their interests, their conflicts, their distinct characters. We have made the arguments that the war in general was a mistake and a lie, and that argument has stuck. It is now time to turn to its bloody details, and begin making precise, informed arguments about the incompetence and meaningless waste at each step.

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. Kick once

n/t

[Karenina]

2. The "evil cleric"

had to be stopped in the name of "democracy." Never mind the wishes of his MILLIONS of supporters...