Informed Speculation

Confirming the obvious, the Pentagon now names the Sadr Army as the biggest threat in Iraq:

Armed militiamen affiliated with radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr pose the gravest danger to the security and stability of Iraq, surpassing Sunni Arab insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, a new Defense Department report to Congress says.

The finding represents the military’s strongest characterization of the danger posed by Sadr and is among the conclusions of a quarterly report to Congress that chronicles the instability in Iraq and record level of sectarian violence.

In the last three months, the number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians rose 22%, and the number of U.S. casualties grew 32%, the Pentagon assessment says.

As attacks have risen, the confidence of the Iraqi people has fallen, with fewer saying in surveys that they thought their government could protect them and more agreeing that civil war was likely.

The conclusion that Sadr-related militiamen posed the chief threat to the country’s security came after the U.S. military had complained for months that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, had been unable to address armed Shiite groups and had obstructed American efforts to confront Sadr.

This is why the surge and new offensive are vital, but only if coupled with a new parliamentary coalition that isolates the cleric.  The Joint Chiefs are against the idea of a surge, however:

The Pentagon has cautioned that a modest surge could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops, the officials said.

The informal but well-armed Shiite militias, the Joint Chiefs have also warned, may simply melt back into society during a U.S. surge and wait until the troops are withdrawn — then reemerge and retake the streets of Baghdad and other cities.

Even the announcement of a time frame and mission — such as for six months to try to secure volatile Baghdad — could play to armed factions by allowing them to game out the new U.S. strategy, the chiefs have warned the White House.

The idea of a much larger military deployment for a longer mission is virtually off the table, at least so far, mainly for logistics reasons, say officials familiar with the debate. Any deployment of 40,000 to 50,000 would force the Pentagon to redeploy troops who were scheduled to go home.

It seems to me that the Joint Chiefs are shorting the political dimension, however; of course, the solution has to be political and not military – but politics is on hold because of the deteriorating security situation.  And the security will not improve until Sadr’s militias are dealt a sound and decisive defeat.  There are a number of things that need to happen, but they have to happen in the right order, and the first step is to convince Maliki to throw loose the chains that bind him to Sadr or to step aside.

As to the mission’s end: I agree there must be an end target in sight.  Perhaps we should heed the words of Christopher Hitchens here:

Iraq has only three alternatives before it. The first is dictatorship by one faction or sect over all the others: a solution that has been exhausted by horrific failure. The second is partition, which would certainly involve direct intervention by all its neighbors to secure privileges for their own proxies and would therefore run the permanent risk of civil war. And the third is federalism, where each group would admit that it was not strong enough to dictate terms to the others and would agree to settle differences by democratic means. Quixotic though the third solution may seem, it is the only alternative to the most gruesome mayhem—more gruesome than anything we have seen so far. It is to the credit of the United States that it has at least continued to hold up this outcome as a possibility—a possibility that would not be thinkable if the field were left to the rival influences of Tehran and Riyadh.

A federation, then, could be the end goal.  It’s a complicated plan, but not an impossible one, and though it may yet fail, the only real alternative is just to start the withdrawal and concede defeat…