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Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated
him. So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media
often described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading
his followers.

During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S.
"surge" of 2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi
Council, he generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So
far from being the inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed
-- when he first appeared they denigrated him as a zatut (an "ignorant
child," in Iraqi dialect) -- he was a highly experienced political
operator who had worked in his father's office in Najaf since he was a
teenager. He also had around him activist clerics, of his own age or
younger, who had hands-on experience under Saddam of street politics
within the Shia community. His grasp of what ordinary Iraqis felt was
to prove far surer than that of the politicians isolated in the Green
Zone in Baghdad.

A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo

Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have
happened to Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their
political and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia
masses. From the moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated
from his open opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority
of the Shia community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.

As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew
among the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that
73% of Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the
security situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make
a Shia-Sunni civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi
politicians, and the Western media habitually failed to recognize the
extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and,
in the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.

All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis
supported Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his
supposedly loyal Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went
home. Iraqis were deeply conscious that their country sat on some of
the world's largest oil reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector
Clouseau-like ability to make catastrophic errors in peace and war had
reduced the people to a state in which their children were stunted
because they did not get enough to eat.

The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be
exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the
same fury possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier
in Shia Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the
Sadrist movement. Instead, people saw their living standards plummet
as provision of food rations, clean water, and electricity faltered.
Saddam's officials were corrupt enough, but the new government
cowering in the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracy
comparable to Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed the loathing with
which the government was regarded, and dodged in and out of
government, enjoying some of the fruits of power while denouncing
those who held it.

Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of
this highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father
and elder brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were
assassinated in 1999 he had every reason to stress his lack of ability
or ambition in order to give the mukhabarat [Saddam Hussein's secret
police] less reason to kill him. As the son and son-in-law of two of
Saddam Hussein's most dangerous opponents, he was a prime suspect and
his every move was watched.

When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears'
political inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on
every possible occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and
Sadr II [Muqtada's father-in-law and father, both assassinated by
Saddam] against a background of the Iraqi flag. There was more here
than a leader exploiting his connection to a revered or respected
parent. Muqtada persistently emphasized the Sadrist ideological
legacy: puritanical Shia Islam mixed with anti-imperialism and
populism.

Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement

The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in
April 2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend
of mine, Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with
whom I had often discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the
involvement of Muqtada himself, which is a matter of dispute, the
involvement of the Sadrist supporters in the lynching is proven and
was the start of a pattern that was to repeat itself over the years.

Muqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over,
sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words
and actions were often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the
Sunni against the occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine
in Samarra in February 2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni,
orchestrating the pogroms against them and failing to restrain the
death squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse that it was "rogue
elements" among his militiamen who were carrying out this slaughter is
not convincing, because the butchery was too extensive and too well
organized to be the work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists
and the Shia in general could argue that it was not they who had
originally taken the offensive against the Sunni, and the Shia
community endured massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda for several years
before their patience ran out.

Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious
leaders unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on
Shia civilians if he was to cooperate with them against the
occupation. They did not do so, and this was a shortsighted failure on
their part, since the Shia, who outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to
one in Iraq, controlled the police and much of the army. Their
retaliation, when it came, was bound to be devastating. Muqtada was
criticized for not doing more, but neither he, nor anybody else could
have stopped the killing at the height of the battle for Baghdad in
2006. The Sunni and Shia communities were both terrified, and each
mercilessly retaliated for the latest atrocity against their
community. "We try to punish those who carry out evil deeds in the
name of the Mehdi Army," says Hussein Ali, the former Mehdi Army
leader. "But there are a lot of Shia regions that are not easy to
control and we ourselves, speaking frankly, are sometimes frightened
by these great masses of people."

American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of
Muqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were
persistent attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government
instead of trying to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base
to include the Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure
from Washington to sever or limit their connection with Muqtada. But
government officials were not alone in being perplexed by the young
cleric. In a lengthy article on him published in its December 4, 2006,
issue, Newsweek admitted that "Muqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding
America's fate in Iraq." But the best the magazine could do to assist
its readers in understanding Muqtada was to suggest that they should
"think of him as a young Mafia don."

Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi
leader who proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would
take over from Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited,
English-speaking exiles who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq
into a compliant U.S. ally, Muqtada looked too much like a younger
version of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq,
which it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by
elections that would produce a government dominated by the Shia allied
to the Kurds. It soon became evident that the Shia parties that were
going to triumph in any election would be Islamic parties, and some
would have close links to Iran.

The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the
Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis"
developing in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and
paranoia on the part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been
tempted to make Iraq a client state they would have found the country
as prickly a place for Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was
the U.S. attempt to create an anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into
Iranian hands and produce the very situation that Washington was
trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its
nuclear program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had
the potential to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was
executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II
had bad relations with Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia
opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But
American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look to Iran for
help, and in a military confrontation the Mehdi Army saw Iran as an
essential source of weapons and military expertise.

The New Iraqi Political Landscape

On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S.
occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities.
The call was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was
now largely a Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to
their old homes. The U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in
sectarian killings, but it was also true that the Shia had won and
there were few mixed areas left.

The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was
improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were
returning. Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the
Sunni on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never
accepted that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live
on the same street, they could hardly share a common identity.

The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the
Sunni population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge,"
but it was still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide
bombs targeting civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni
sectarian warfare since 2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the
insurgent groups had turned against al-Qaeda after it tried to
monopolize power within the Sunni community at the end of 2006 by
declaring the Islamic State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was
al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one son from every Sunni family into its
ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with the government such as garbage
collectors were killed.

By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was
trumpeting successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely
eliminated in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters,
by now armed and paid for by the United States, did not owe their
prime loyalty to the Iraqi government. Muqtada might speak of new
opportunities for pan-Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation, but
many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters had quite different ideas. They
wanted to reverse the Shia victory in the 2006 battle of Baghdad.

A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of
them, Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He
operates in the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a
commander of the U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls
Concerned Citizens. His stated objectives show that the rise of the
new Sunni militias may mark only a new stage in a sectarian civil war.
"Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed. "After we finish with
al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main enemy, the Shia militias.
I will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area near Amariya taken
over by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."

The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam
Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors
in Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his
movement. Had he been part of the political process from the
beginning, the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would
have been greater.

In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must
play a central role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of
millions of poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he
never wholly controlled his own movement, and never created as
well-disciplined a force as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his
ambitions for reconciliation with the Sunni could take wing unless the
Mehdi Army ceased to be identified with death squads and sectarian
cleansing.

The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while
violence diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been
resolved. The differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within
the respective communities, and the antagonism against the U.S.
occupation are all as great as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the
Mehdi Army could create confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant
what he said when he called for unity, would be for them to be taken
back voluntarily into the areas in Baghdad and elsewhere from which
they have been driven. But there is no sign of this happening. The
disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for the country to
exist as anything more than a loose federation.

Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in
London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was
recipient of the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well
as the 2006 James Cameron Memorial Award. His book The Occupation: War
and Resistance in Iraq, was short-listed for a National Book Critics
Circle Award in 2007. This essay is the last chapter in his new book,
Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq,
just published by Scribner.