Al-Sadr’s State

On Tuesday, CNN released an article that claims that Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army has replaced al Qaeda in Iraq as “the most dangerous accelerant” of the sectarian violence plaguing Iraq for nearly a year, according to a Pentagon report.

I think that if anything, this revelation essentially makes it clear that what you have in Iraq is a Civil War, without a doubt. Al Qaeda was always somewhat of a foreign presence in Iraq, but the fact that it’s now been overtaken by a native Shiite cause (and it has been for a while, the violence has just been slowly escalating over the past few years) under the command of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose support for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government is crucial to the government’s stability, is by far a sign that things in Iraq are not going very well, to say the least.

I have to disagree with William Broyles, Jr. though. While the fact that we have an all-voluntary army fighting in Iraq precludes, by and large, a class-less army, reinstating the draft would be a bad idea. While it might bring about a hastened end to the war—after all, college kids are mostly from middle to upper-middle class families—it presents Americans with a false choice. The only option, not necessarily the right or most moral one, is to simply pull out. There is no way without coalition and or NATO help that Iraq can be “fixed,” and now even Tony Blair, our strongest ally, has stated that he’s going to begin gradual troop withdrawal over the next year or so, under pressure from the British Parliament.