TO WREAK HAVOC, KIDNAP. As Spencer notes below, for the past five days, U.S. troops had been encircling Sadr City in order to find a missing soldier they believed was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army, the militia of fiercely anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sadr denies involvement, but the brother-in-law of the kidnapped soldier says the perpetrators were clearly taking him to Sadr City, the stronghold of, well, Sadr. The U.S. has now lifted the blockade after pressure from Sadr and Prime Minister Maliki, who depends on the former for support. Spencer may be right that there is some "kabuki theater" going on here, but the more straightforward explanation seems more likely to me: the blockade was becoming counterproductive. There was a huge bombing in Sadr City yesterday, and Sadr partisans were quick to point the finger at the Americans for not allowing the Mahdi Army to provide their own security. And of course, people weren't happy that all of the checkpoints surrounding the neighborhood were apparently all just for one U.S. soldier. Sadr's movement appears to be splintering, so Sadr doesn't necessarily control everyone who says they are "Mahdi Army" in any case. He may be losing support due to the radicalization of Iraqi Shi'a -- yes, there are Shi'a more radical than Muqtada -- eager to avenge sectarian killings and take a more militant stance against the U.S. The siege of Sadr City plays into the hands of those radicals. Kidnappings of this sort put the military in a wrenching moral dilemma: do we do everything in our power to get our people back alive, and risk provoking greater anger at the U.S.? Or do we abandon him to certain death in service of (perhaps elusive) broader stability? Does an all-out response show resolve and unwillingness to tolerate kidnappings, or is it a miscalculation? What do readers (and my Tapped colleagues) think?
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Blake Hounshell
