Al Sadr Accepts US Surrender

No, that's not a headline you're likely to see in the SCLM, but there's really no better way to describe Muqtada Al Sadr's instructions to his militia to return to their homes. Remember, the US objective was not to disband the Mehdi Army. In fact, we mobilized the Mehdi Army by pursuing our objective, which was to "kill or capture" Al Sadr in an effort to enforce a warrant issued by an occupation court.

Al Sadr, you may note, has not been killed or captured. Although there's been an attempt to brand him as a pariah, even George Bush has now legitimized a political role for Muqtada in Iraq's future. Our failure to achieve our stated objective in the uprising is abject.

Although many will point to enemy casualties and the restoration of a fragile hold on some Iraqi territory, Juan Cole describes the situation well.

Muqtada has not really lost anything as compared to the situation before last April 3, when the American suddenly came after him. He did not control Najaf at that time, or the holy city of Karbala, either. His militia was strongest in the slums of East Baghdad. This is still true. The Americans killed perhaps 1500 of his best fighters, and captured or destroyed a lot of ordnance. But Muqtada has thousands of cadres, and they can be rearmed fairly easily (most have not really been disarmed).

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Muqtada launched an insurgency to teach the Americans a lesson, and it certainly did. They lost control of the south, their supply and communications lines were cut, and they even lost control of most of the capital for a while.

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I'd say the entire thing has to be seen as one of the biggest fiascoes in all of US military and diplomatic history.

(emphasis mine)

It rivals, in fact, the situation in Fallujah as an example of US defeat in Iraq. Our objective there was not to create a new brigade of local forces generally hostile to the occupation, which is what was achieved. It wasn't even, at least not originally, to disarm a local insurgency. It was to identify, apprehend and bring to justice people responsible for killing a squad of American mercenaries and mutilating their bodies.

No one, of course, was apprehended for those crimes. No one is scheduled for trial. We failed in our objective. In military terms, such a failure is called 'defeat.'

I guess they're right. This is different than Vietnam. In Vietnam, we won all the battles.