Sustani backs Iraqi coalition that includes Sunnis

NY Times:

Iraq’s most venerated Shiite cleric has tentatively approved an American-backed coalition of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties that aims to isolate extremists, particularly the powerful Shiite militia leader Moktada al-Sadr, Iraqi and Western officials say.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has been the spiritual custodian of Shiite political dominance in Iraq, corralling the fractious Shiite parties into an alliance to rule the country.

But Ayatollah Sistani has grown increasingly distressed as the Shiite-led government has proved incapable of taming the violence and improving public services, Shiite officials say. He now appears to be backing away from his demand that the Shiite bloc play the dominant political role and that it hold together at all costs, Iraqi and Western officials say.

As the effective arbiter of a Shiite role in the planned coalition, the ayatollah is considered critical to the Iraqi and American effort.

American officials have been told by intermediaries that Ayatollah Sistani “has blessed the idea of forming a moderate front,” according to a senior American official. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far without his support.”

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This seems to be an admission of the failure of the current Shia government to seize the opportunity they have been given. It also marks the failure of the Sadr group and its militia. Sadr has been doing counter strikes against the Sunnis, that the government appears to have been winking at. These counter strikes actually increased the appearance of chaos which made the government look even weaker. It should be noted that these Sadr counter strikes are in the tradition of middle east state actors. They had the veneer of deniability because they were done using the militia instead of the army.

One of the reasons this route was taken is that the media has wholly failed to hold the Sunnis accountable for its persistent violations of the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war. The only parties that the media requires to live up to those standards are the US and the Iraqi government. Son witht he Sunni insurgency violating the Conventions at will as part of its overall strategy, it is not surprising that the government would not resist the efforts of Shia militia to answer in kind. This bias against holding the enemy accountable for its war crimes and mentioning them on a daily basis is just inexplicable and unforgivable.