By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

The Iraq war was arguably America’s biggest foreign-policy blunder since the Vietnam War. Although the American withdrawal from Iraq hasn’t been quite as shambolic as its exit from Afghanistan, Washington’s influence there, almost two decades after George W. Bush’s invasion, is rapidly waning.

One sign of this? A parliamentary election held a few weeks ago was won by a man responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of U.S. soldiers -- yet he was still seen as the lesser evil.

Following the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, Washington’s troubles in Iraq were just beginning, and much of it was due to the dreaded Mahdi Army led by the Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

It was formed in June of that year with the objective of evicting American forces, and it rose to prominence in April 2004 when it spearheaded the first major armed confrontation against the U.S. forces from the Shi’ite community. Over the years, the Mahdi Army killed a large percentage of the 4,500 American soldiers who died in Iraq.

However, with the U.S. now virtually out of Iraq, al-Sadr has reinvented himself as a political figure. And although a fervent enemy of the U.S., he has shown himself more independent of Iran than most other Shi’ite politicians.

Al-Sadr is the son of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr, a Shi’ite dignitary who was politically active against Saddam Hussein, for which he paid with his life in 1999.

The Sadrist base is significant in Baghdad and the southern Shi’ite provinces because it represents a Shi’ite underclass that viewed Muhammad al-Sadr as a religious authority who cared for them and preached to them when no one else dared to.

This base continues to feel marginalised today, and Muqtada al-Sadr appeals to them as the heir to his father’s position.

On October 10 Iraqis voted in an early election to determine the makeup of the unicameral Council of Representatives, Iraq’s national legislature. It was held months before schedule to meet the demands of a mass protest movement that was calling for sweeping political reform.

With the votes counted, al-Sadr emerged as the head of the largest party in Iraq’s parliament. His Sadrist Movement obtained 72 of the 329 parliamentary seats -- a significant increase compared with the 2018 result, when it won 54 seats.

The Iran-backed Conquest Alliance (Fatah) bloc led by paramilitary leader Hadi Al Amiri, comprising an array of politicians and militia commanders closely linked to Iran, suffered a significant defeat.

They lost two-thirds of their parliamentary seats, securing only 14 seats, a dramatic loss from a 2018 high of 47. However, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, who has also been an Iranian ally in the past, won 35 seats.

Al-Sadr claims that the next Government will be a Sadrist one and the prime minister a staunch Sadrist. He is most likely to nominate the politically independent current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, for a second term. 

But other partners will be needed to form a government and the risk of taking sole responsibility for government failures may mean that he accepts a coalition that reduces the Sadrist identity of the government. So, while he opposes both Tehran and Washington, his status as a kingmaker isn’t guaranteed, as Iran tries to unite all the Shi’ite parties.

Sadr will likely work with other parties, including Sunni Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi’s Progress Party (37 seats), the Kurdistan Democratic Party (33 seats), and some nominally independent members of parliament (37 in total), to ensure he retains the prerogative to appoint his prime minister of choice.

Tehran has historically been able to bend al-Sadr to its will when necessary and likely believes that a combination of Iranian pressure and his inherent anti-American tendencies will be sufficient to advance Iran’s core strategic objectives: ousting remaining U.S. forces from Iraq and maintaining a non-threatening, Shi’ite-led client state there.

Iranian rhetoric suggests that its leadership is unwilling to dramatically destabilize Iraq just over the election results. Tehran knows that the makeup of Iraqi governments has never been determined by electoral results alone and that its proxies will still have a say in the process.