Resident Fellow  David Frum

What the hell is going on in Basra? According to the major media outlets in New York and London, the answer is: a major defeat for U.S. and British policy in Iraq. This is how the well-regarded Michael Gordon of the New York Times reported the story:

". . .Mr. Maliki overestimated his military's abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare.

"'He went in with a stick and he poked a hornet's nest, and the resistance he got was a little bit more than he bargained for,' said one official in the multinational force in Baghdad who requested anonymity. 'They went in with 70% of a plan. Sometimes that's enough. This time it wasn't.'"

And here is the British journalist Robert Fox, whose reporting often reflects the thinking of the United Kingdom's defence establishment.

"[Moqtada al-] Sadr didn't start the latest round of fighting in Basra. The ill-advised and strategically challenged prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, did.

"He gambled that he had enough muscle in the Iraqi army to drive Sadr's militia from running Basra. So far, he has gambled and lost; and now there must be serious doubts about whether he can continue in office and pretend to be the prime minister of all Iraq and all Iraqis for much longer."

These grim assessments are backed by some objective facts.

On Thursday, the Iraqi Defence Ministry acknowledged that more than 1,000 government soldiers--including dozens of officers, two of them of senior field grade--had deserted during the Basra fight.

As I write, the fighting in Basra has been suspended by a truce that some claim was brokered by Iran. Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed. The Sadrist militias continue to function. So: a disaster?

Those negative judgments are not however shared by writers closer to the action. One of the outstanding native Iraqi observers of events in-country is Nibras Kazimi, a young democracy activist without sectarian bias. Here is what he had to say in his important blog, Talismangate.blogspot.com about the character of the Sadr militias in Basra.

"The Mahdi Army in Basra is only an army in the sense that 'soldiers' and 'capos' are rankings in the Cosa Nostra. These organized crime cartels serve many purposes, chief among which is getting rich quick. There's ample opportunity for mischief in Basra and plenty to pilfer and smuggle: oil, arms, drugs and whatever happens to fall off a truck leaving the port, after the truck itself had been 're-routed.' "

As the Sadrists have evolved into a crime syndicate, their leaders have lost much of their former command of their supporters. Moqtada al-Sadr himself lives in Iran--a strange exile for a cleric who used to rail against the Persian origins of his more religiously prestigious rival, the Ayatollah Sistani. As for Sadr's followers, Kazimi reports, "affluence has made them slothful and soft. Sadrist leaders today are bejeweled with agate rings, Rolexes and precious worry beads, and sport Turkish-tailored suits. They ride around in the latest-model armoured SUVs and have taken their second (and third and fourth and . . .) wives--in some cases the ultimate Iraqi Shia male status symbol, a Lebanese Shia trophy wife. . . . These were the same angry, dejected men that one would meet in 2003 wearing polyester dishdashas with sweat-stained towels around their necks."

And in the battle for Basra, these gangsters seem to have got the worst of it. It was the Mahdi Army that asked for a truce from the government. The Mahdi Army seems to have hoped that government action in Basra would trigger uprisings elsewhere in Iraq: those did not occur.

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.

As always, Iraq is full of mysteries. But here's the best key I have seen to understand this latest puzzle, offered by a reader of Jules Crittenden's blog who identifies himself only as "Major John":

"The fight up North is the fight to run al-Qaeda out of Iraq. The fight down South is the fight to see which way Iraq will go once al-Qaeda is beaten."

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.