Tough Sell by Tom Basile

Author:Tom Basile [Basile, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC052000 Social Science / Media Studies, HIS026030 History / Middle East / Iraq
ISBN: 9781612349077
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2017-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

Tactical recommendations would then be made for action by the Strategic Communications Office in preparation of a project’s completion. Of course, it was Iraq, so timetables slipped and priorities changed, and some projects were canceled in favor of others. The matrix developed was constantly updated and shifted. It didn’t matter. The important thing was the ability to be organized and ahead of the game.

Around the middle of October, Charles had had about enough. This guy was a machine and had been working like one for months. He slept little and ate less. We in the office truly believed that if he did one more press conference or had one more argument with Al Jazeera, he’d snap. Charles needed a vacation. Much to my surprise, he actually recognized that he needed a break and, after hemming and hawing about it a bit, left for what the Brits call “holiday.” Dan was with Bremer in the United States and Thatcher was shouldering the load of the operation.

Before Charles left he asked me to handle a communications planning project with the folks in governance and CJTF7. A couple of days later, I attended a meeting in Ambassador Greenstock’s office with Lieutenant Colonel Krivo, the CJTF7 spokesperson, a representative from the CPA Governance Office, and a couple of others. The discussion related to the possibility that coalition and Iraqi forces might, in very short order, conduct an operation to capture rebel Shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr.

Sadr, the son of a respected Shiite cleric, Sadiq Muhammad al Sadr, had been instigating violent protest within the Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad for several months. His father was murdered by Saddam’s regime in 1999 and, consequently, the elder Sadr became one of the great martyrs for the Shiite community in Iraq. After the war, the members of the neighborhood council in the poor Shiite area of Saddam City voted to rename their section of town Sadr City. The younger Sadr was forming his own army and looked to bring his own brand of theocratic dominance to the new Iraq. He was thirty at the time and, although he held himself out as a holy man, had no formal training and was described by some clerics as an apostate. Sadr was a thug with a gang, but he was becoming much more than that. It was believed that he had ordered the killing of Grand Ayatollah Majid al-Khoie in Najaf in April 2003, and he was suspected of stealing more than two million Iraqi dinars from a mosque. An Iraqi court had even issued an arrest warrant for Sadr in connection with the al-Khoie murder. He and his followers were also suspected of being behind several attacks on coalition forces.

His influence was growing, and his ability to incite violence and anti-coalition demonstrations among poor Shiite populations was also on the rise. He shrewdly established a newspaper that became his mouthpiece throughout the country, while his Mahdi Army was growing in strength. Sadr’s forces were young, unemployed, downtrodden Shiites whose years of desperation and abuse had turned them into pieces of clay, ready to be molded.

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