Quotes of the Day

There's nothing inevitable about civil war in Iraq, but whether or not the sectarian violence that has killed hundreds in the past week devolves into full-blown conflagration will depend on choices made by political leaders. As bodies continued to pile up, Tuesday, following a series of suicide bombings that killed at least 55 people, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad suggested the crisis had passed because Iraq's elected leaders had decided to work together to avoid a civil war. Khalilzad has been working behind the scenes to coax the main Sunni parliamentary parties back to the negotiating table and to tamp down the belligerence of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest party in the Shi'ite alliance.

Still, Khalilzad may have an overly rosy view of things. There have yet to be any indications of a new willingness among those same officials to make the real compromises needed to break the deadlock over forming a government of national unity. And the sectarian upsurge appears to have boosted the political momentum of forces outside of Khalilzad's sphere of influence, foremost among them the firebrand Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Despite waging two insurrections against U.S. forces and antagonizing some more powerful Shi'ite leaders, Sadr has emerged not only as the kingmaker within the dominant Shi'ite parliamentary alliance, but also as potentially the most important bridge between Shi'ite and Sunni militants. The events of the past week saw him take a major role in the parliament of the streets which rapidly eclipsed the tortuous negotiations of elected legislators: Sadr's followers are reported to have been in the forefront of attacks on Sunnis in the 24 hours that followed the Samarra bombing, while their leader was away in Lebanon burnishing his regional credentials.

But Sadr immediately demanded restraint, and sent representatives to huddle with leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni clerical body with ties to the insurgency. That move, and talk of joint action to protect holy places, underlined Sadr's ability to reach out to at least some Sunnis—not least because of nationalist credentials built by his confrontations with U.S. forces, and also by his firm rejection of the SCIRI proposal for a southern Shi'ite mini-state.

In essence, Sadr appears to be betting that Shi'ite and Sunni Iraqis mistrust the U.S. more than they mistrust each other, a not unreasonable assumption. Indeed, both Shi'ites and Sunnis on the streets tend to blame the U.S. presence for the mounting sectarian discord; opinion polls have long found a majority of Iraqis wanting Coalition forces to leave. The parties of the dominant Shi'ite alliance are formally committed to a similar position, although in reality they're in no hurry to face the security consequences of a hasty U.S. departure. Still, Sadr's game plan may include championing the demand for the U.S. to go. He has called for joint Shi'ite-Sunni worship at Friday prayers this week, in preparation of a mass national unity march in Baghdad, which would demand U.S. withdrawal.

But even as the events of the past week underscored the need for indigenous units who would be willing to intervene in such a civil conflict, they have also made any such withdrawal an even greater challenge. The strategy for drawing down U.S. force levels, after all, has been predicated on replacing them with Iraqi units. But the sectarian upsurge has also highlighted the troubling extent to which many of the men in the most capable Iraqi security units remain loyal to ethnic and sectarian agendas. Shi'ite leader al-Hakim, for instance, had initially blamed the Samarra bombing in part on Khalilzad's pressure on his party to relinquish control of the Interior Ministry, which controls some 110,000 police and paramilitary personnel—many of whom are drawn from Shi'ite militias and have been accused of doubling as death squads targeting Sunnis.

And for all his vehemence about getting the U.S. out, Sadr may be inclined to hedge his bets. On the one hand he is warning Iraqis that the greatest danger they face is posed by the presence of “the occupation forces"; on the other hand he appears to be qualifying that demand with the rider, "even if on their own timetable." That may sound like a contradiction. Or it may just be a sign that Sadr has learned better than most of his peers in Iraq's political class that avoiding disaster in Iraq will require, above all, a great degree of flexibility.

• Tony Karon
• As elected leaders struggle to compromise, the radical cleric works the consensus on the streets