Time Mag: Sadr plans to sit back and let the US/Iraqi forces fight the Sunnis

[sabra]

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1585521,00.html

How Sadr Plans to Ride Out the Surge

Moqtada Sadr and his Mehdi Army seem to have decided that, for now, the best defense against the American troop surge is no defense. Rather than risk another major confrontation like the battles of 2004 in which they lost thousands of men, the military and political leadership of Sadr's movement is going out of its way to be conciliatory.

...

But allowing the Americans to pass unchallenged through Sadr City is not the same thing as embracing the U.S. agenda for Iraq. It may simply make tactical sense to stand down the Mehdi Army temporarily, denying the U.S. military a target. Meanwhile the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi security forces, which include many Sadr sympathizers and actual members of his militia, continue their fight against Sunni insurgents.

U.S. officials have painted the surge as a temporary step, some hinting that it may last only a matter of months. That's not a long time in the outlook of an organization that must consider its position in Iraq in terms of decades. If political support for the U.S. presence in Iraq collapses, or if the military simply cannot sustain a meaningful increase in troop strength, the Mehdi Army will have won a victory without ever joining the battle.

...

The more immediate concern for the surge strategy is not the maneuvers of militias commanders, but the fact that the loyalty of government security forces is dubious, at best. The Mehdi Army's most important stronghold may not, in fact, be Sadr City as such, but rather its legion of supporters inside government ministries, army units and police stations.

[Botany]

1. Just like Vietnam

Avoid straight up battles and run a hit and run war in the rear ......
and sooner or later we will have to go home and Sadr takes over.



Meanwhile we will win every battle and sooner later lose the war.

[MADem]

2. The Saudis have told Big Dick Cheney that if he doesn't back off his

rah-rah Shi'a act and put those troops BETWEEN the shi'a and sunni, that they'd fund the sunnis themselves....

[SoCalDem]

3. That darned Moqtada..he must have been reading some books on tactical warfare

Too bad our pressie only reads when shamed into it..and even then we only see him carrying the book..and no one ever seems to engage him in a discussion of the book he just "read"..

Middle easterners measure time in thousands of years..not months.. Sadr will wait patiently for the surge to ebb, and then he will do what he's been planning for decades..

[theoldman]

6. The books on warfare were written by the Chinese. See my

post below.

[theoldman]

4. This is the strategy that Mao used against the Chinese

Nationalist. The Communist would hit and run. They did not have the weapons but they outnumbered their enemy. I have mentioned this before that this is how the Chinese plan to defeat the US. Time is on their side, the Insurgents in Iraq and the Chinese know this.

[SoCalDem]

5. It's also how we won the revolutionary war.. hide, ambush, hit and run

We forgot a lesson we learned 231 years ago.

[theoldman]

7. True, George Washington lost most of his battles but

won the war.