Making sense of Basra
David Frum offers his assessment of the recent fighting in Basra, in which, in the MSM's telling, the Iraqi government forces were defeated so roundly that their opponent, the Mahdi army, asked the government for a truce:
The big news from Basra seems to be this: Just as the Maliki government secured peace in western Iraq by striking deals with the local Sunni tribes, so it now seems to have bought itself a constituency in the South — enough of a constituency anyway that it could stage and wage major combat operations without much assistance from the United States. That’s more evidence that the central government is gaining strength. Yet more evidence comes from what is reported as the major piece of bad news from Basra, the role of the Iranians. Rather than sustain Sadrist resistance to the central government, the Iranians seem to have decided to back the same horse previously backed by the Americans. The Iranian decision not to sustain the Sadrists is even more arresting because it follows on the heels of last month’s Iraqi very public rebuff of an offer of economic aid and cooperation from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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