"Muqtada," a powerful man in a complex Iraq

"Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq"

by Patrick Cockburn

Scribner, 215 pp., $24

Patrick Cockburn, who has reported from Iraq since 1978, says that the Bush administration counted on some "dark-suited, English-speaking exile" to take over after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and to turn Iraq into a compliant U.S. ally.

What the White House did not expect was black-turbaned Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric who, in Cockburn's words, "looked too much like a younger version of the Ayatollah Khomeini," founder of the Islamic republic in Iran.

Al-Sadr is not a carbon copy of Khomeini, and the extent of Iran's influence on him is a matter of dispute. But he is certainly, as Cockburn says, "the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the U.S. invasion."

In his book "Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq," Cockburn traces the history of this Shiite leader of millions of mostly poor Iraqis. Given the recent fighting between the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and factions of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, this is an important book for understanding Iraq and the 35-year-old religious leader who might one day break out of his power base in the slums of Baghdad and formally rule the country, or some part of it.

While al-Sadr's emergence as a force to be reckoned with came within days of the April 2003 capture of Baghdad by U.S. forces, the groundwork for al-Sadr's rise has a long history. Cockburn spends half the book explaining that background, starting in 680 A.D. with the beginning of the Shiite branch of Islam and jumping forward several centuries to trace the al-Sadr family's leading role in the resistance to Saddam.

Muqtada al-Sadr's father-in-law, Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, was executed by Saddam in 1980, and al-Sadr's father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was assassinated by Saddam's security agents in 1999. Two of al-Sadr's brothers also died in that attack.

Besides having this heritage, al-Sadr holds sway over many of his countrymen for just being there (as opposed to other leaders who fled Iraq) during the 1991 Shiite uprising, after the first U.S. adventure in Iraq and Saddam's brutal repression that followed (150,000 Shiites killed). His anti-U.S. stance is rooted in the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 action. These had a devastating effect on the people of Iraq, an ordeal which, as Cockburn writes, was not experienced or fully appreciated by Iraqis who returned from exile after 2003.

This history — dry as it is at times — helps explain Iraq's religious and ethnic makeup and how the parts rub up against each other. It also makes it hard to imagine an early and graceful U.S. exit from Iraq.

Cockburn concludes that if al-Sadr had been brought into the political process from the beginning instead of resisted and fought against, "the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater."

It's unlikely that the U.S. would have cooperated in 2003 with someone whose newspaper once called the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "a miracle and blessing from God," but Cockburn may be correct in his assessment that nothing has been resolved in Iraq and that the "disintegration of Iraq has probably gone too far for the country to exist as anything more than a loose federation."

John B. Saul is the former deputy Metro editor at The Seattle Times and teaches journalism part time at the University of Montana.