It's Not a Civil War...

...it's an extermination campaign. So far in the month of January, 600 civilian deaths have been recorded by the media in all of Iraq. Of those, 470 occurred in Baghdad. Of those, 400 were executions (of, I assume, Sunni males -- killed by Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army). You could call it a civil war, but that phrase usually suggests one side fighting against the other. This is more like one side simply executing -- in ever larger numbers -- the men who belong to the other side.

I am making some inferences here because the relevant news accounts refer to victims of "death squads" (and I take that to mean the Mahdi Army) and they refer to the victims as "bodies" (and I take that to mean "Sunni males"). I believe that these are safe assumptions, but one cannot be certain about that.

The fact that Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army is almost single-handedly responsible for the high level of civilian deaths we have seen over the last few months in Iraq has led many to call for an attack against him to restore order in Baghdad. But I have previously noted that U.S. officials are remarkably reluctant to come right out and say that the coming offensive in Baghdad will target his Mahdi Army militia. That makes me think we are not going to target them, which I take to be good news. According to my long-standing theory, Muqtada al Sadr's militia was given the green light to confront Sunni insurgents and their al Qaeda associates operating in Baghdad in a way that American troops never could. Whereas American troops are required to direct their fire at enemy combatants (who reveal themselves only when they fire first), Muqtada al Sadr is, I assume, summarily executing any Sunni male he encounters (after first torturing him for information that he might have about the insurgency).

As I noted before, American officials will not say that they are going to confront Muqtada. As it turns out, neither will Prime Minister Maliki:

Baghdad: The Iraqi prime minister on Saturday issued his first comment on the new Bush administration plan for restoring security in Baghdad, declaring it "identical to our strategy and intentions."

Nouri Al Maliki, however, continued to avoid naming the Mehdi Army Shiite militia of one of his key supporters as a target of the military operations to cleanse the capital of Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia and death squads.

We are not going to confront the soldiers of the Mahdi Army because, although they hate Americans, they are nevertheless serving as effective allies in the war against the Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. They are cooperating with the Maliki government (I think), and I hold out hope that they will cooperate with the coming troop surge. For one thing, civilian casualties would plummet, in which case the world would consider the troop surge to be a great success. For another, American casualties might be minimized.

This might be wishful thinking on my part, but there is, in fact, some indication that the Madhi Army will cooperate:

Mahdi Army lowers its profile, anticipating arrival of U.S. troops

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements.

"We have explicit directions to keep a low profile . . . not to confront, not to be dragged into a fight and to calm things down," said one official who received the orders from the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
...
Militia members say al-Sadr ordered them to stand down shortly after President George Bush's announcement that the U.S. would send 17,500 more American troops to Baghdad to work alongside the Iraqi security forces.

If this is true, it fits with my theory that Muqtada al Sadr has been doing our dirty work, so to speak. Now that he has made some progress, he is going to let us try our hand at controlling the Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad. Here is some more information from the article suggesting that there may be no confrontation with the Mahdi Army in store for us:

"If the Mahdi Army is attacked, they will defend themselves," said Sheikh Abdul Razzaq al-Nidawi, a senior al-Sadr official in Najaf. "American troops are the enemy troops . . . if the Americans want armed resistance, we are ready, but we will work hard not to get involved in an armed opposition and we will work hard to endure the pressure even if we make sacrifices to keep our people and country safe."

Across the capital residents described a changed Mahdi Army - in Sadr City, a Shiite slum of more than 2 million people, in Talbiyah on the outskirts of Sadr City, and in Hurriyah, a formerly Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the north of the capital that in recent weeks has been taken over by the Mahdi Army.

Checkpoints in those locations were gone. Instead, young men in jeans and buttoned shirts directed traffic, helped the Iraqi army and wandered the streets nonchalantly.

The Mahdi Army is not the target (according to my theory, at least). Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists are. President Bush said so in his speech to the nation (as I noted before), and Prime Minister Maliki makes the same point:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose political backers include al-Sadr, has told legislators and advisors that security forces under the new plan will first go after the Sunni insurgency, which is responsible for most of the capital's car and roadside bombs that target Shiites and U.S. forces.

After that, he's said he'll move to quell militias, including the Mahdi Army, who are suspected in the killings of dozens of Sunnis.

Dozens of Sunnis? That's an understatement. But this does seem to be the plan: the Mahdi Army will be dealt with after the insurgents are confronted (not at the same time). And here is more along those lines:

American officers here say they have no plans to go after militia groups as long as the militias do not attack.

"We're not necessarily going after the militias if the militias don't come after us," said Army Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a military spokesman for the Multi-National Division-Baghdad. "Our mission is not to take down the militias, that's a function of the government."

Weighing against my theory is this new article by two reporters who work for the Boston Globe:

U.S. military says it has new mandate to pursue Shiite militias
Officials say new approach includes strikes against leaders

WASHINGTON: U.S. military officials say the Bush administration has given them new authority to target leaders of political and religious militias in Iraq who are implicated in sectarian violence, including the powerful Shiite Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
...
The officials said that the new approach would include pinpoint strikes against top leaders in the Mahdi Army as well as other militias from the Shiite majority, which are accused of kidnapping and murdering civilians from the Sunni Muslim minority. The officials said they would focus on methodical manhunts for key leaders, like the one in June that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a key Al Qaeda operative, rather than full-scale battles.

Unlike the previous article I was quoting from, this article does not name any of the "officials" who made these statements, so I am inclined to give it less credibility. I sincerely doubt that Muqtada al Sadr is going to be assassinated (not by security forces, anyway). But the test of my theory is about to get underway, so we'll soon find out.

While these two news stories seem to completely contradict each other, they both note that few people believe that Maliki, a Shiite himself, will ever go after Shiite militias. I really don't believe that Maliki will go after the Shiite militias either. He is aiming for a political agreement with Muqtada once the insurgency in Baghdad is crushed and the Sunnis in Anbar Province come to their senses.

I hope that is how it will all play out. Unfortunately, the Sunnis do not appear to be rational to me, so it is easy for me to envision a post-surge future in which Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army extends its Sunni extermination campaign to the Anbar Provice. Still, if anything can change the self-destructive attitude of the Sunnis, it's the execution campaign underway in Baghdad. It has given them a glimpse of the future they face doing things their way.