“Influential Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr would dissolve his Mehdi Army militia if the United States started withdrawing troops according to a set timetable, a spokesman said.

The comments come at a crucial point in talks between Baghdad and Washington over a new security pact that will provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to operate in Iraq when a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year.

U.S. President George W. Bush has refused to set a firm timetable for withdrawing 144,000 American troops from Iraq, but spoke last month of a general “time horizon” for a pullout.

Iraqi negotiators have proposed that U.S. combat troops leave the country by October 2010, although Washington has not yet agreed to it, a senior Iraqi official said on Friday.

If agreed, the timetable would mean the Bush administration effectively adopting a schedule very close to that proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.”

Sadr to Disarm

All is not well, however. The Iraqi parliament went home without agreement on provincial elections — meaning the elections, and the public expression of power to various factions they would provide, are postponed indefinitely. Not good says Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark. Really not good. The Awakenings movement people, Sunnis, who have provided the backbone of the settling down from the extremes of sectarian violence, are “losing patience.” Prospects for a major Sunni revival in resistance to Shiite domination have increased markedly.

Leaders of the Awakenings have been warning that they are “losing patience” and “the next few months will be decisive” so many times that I suspect some people have stopped taking them seriously. As with the evident nonchalance about the prospects of the major Sunni insurgency factions flipping back to the other side, this seems to rest on a notion that they have nowhere else to go and that there is neither the ability nor the desire to go back to the insurgency (“we don’t need to accommodate those hoodlums,” pace General Keane). This strikes me as a very dangerous bit of best-case scenario thinking, of a kind which hurt American efforts in the past and has continued to mar the analysis of surge cheerleaders throughout. There are all kinds of warning lights blinking, from both the Awakenings and from the insurgency factions whose members make up many of their cadres outside of Anbar:

* For the last eight months they have been the target of a systematic campaign of attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq (AQI). I have not seen any reliable statistics about the toll this has taken, but hardly a day goes by without a report of another attack on a checkpoint manned by Awakenings fighters or a hit on a leader. This has led to a lot of complaints from the Awakenings of a lack of military support from the US and the Iraqi security forces – they feel that they are being put on the front lines and not being supported.
* Their frustration at not being integrated into the Iraqi security forces has been mounting for months.

Read all at Abu Aardvark.

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