February 22, 2008 3:45

Iraq: First, the Good News...

Moqtada al-Sadr has come a long way since 2004. With the Shi'ite leader stirring up rebellion against the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and believed to be somehow involved in the lynching of a pro-American rival cleric, the U.S. effectively put a price on his head. "The mission of US forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then America's most senior general in Iraq, said at the time. Now al-Sadr and the U.S. increasingly have a meeting of minds.

Al-Sadr, largely to staunch the decline in his political support by reining in his undisciplined Mahdi Army, called a cease-fire six months ago. On Friday, in a statement read at mosques around Iraq, he renewed that truce for another six months. Al-Sadr's move has been one of the main factors behind the success of the Gen. Petraeus's "surge" over the past year--and U.S. commanders know it. In a glowing statement--quite a contrast to Sanchez's death threat against al-Sadr four years ago--the U.S. military praised the renewed truce for giving more opportunity for Iraqi national reconciliation and for focusing Iraqi army efforts on chasing Al Qaeda extremists. "Those who continue to honor al-Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr's pledge will be treated with respect and restraint," said the statement. "Those who dishonor the al-Sadr pledge are regrettably tarnishing both the name and the honor of the movement." Who would have thought the U.S. military would ever be doing al-Sadr's PR? Seems the idealists are out, and the pragmatists are firmly in command.

The bad news is that the other shoe has dropped in northern Iraq: Turkish forces numbering as many as 10,000 launched a major incursion on Thursday evening. Ankara has been threatening such a move since last October after PKK Kurdish guerrillas stepped up attacks inside Turkey, including one that killed 13 Turkish soldiers. There will now be fears of a long-term Turkish military presence in northern Iraq that stokes up Kurdish nationalist feelings throughout that region as well as in eastern Turkey, and northern ethnic regions of Syria and Iran. This, in turn, puts further strains on Iraq's efforts to resist pressures that could lead to breaking the country apart into Kurdish, Sunni and Shi'ite mini-states.

No doubt one of the reasons the Turkish army has held back was the approach of winter. Snow continues to blanket northern Iraq, but the weather will be getting warmer soon and become more attractive for anti-PKK ground operations. The new offensive seems to signal a failure of Iraqi government efforts to tackle the PKK problem itself. That's not much of a surprise, given that the Iraqi government has to rely on the regional Kurdish authorities to take the initiative against the PKK, a problematic task given widespread Kurdish sympathy there for the group. The incursion also indicates an end of sorts of Turkish patience with American diplomats. Though expressing sympathy for Turkey, U.S. officials have strongly warned that a Turkish military attack could nonetheless destabilize Iraq and even backfire on Ankara by stoking greater Kurdish fury inside Turkey itself.

We'll have to wait and see how Turkey's military offensive goes and how long the troops actually stay in the region. But for now, the Iraq mess continues.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo