Cockburn, Patrick, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, Faber and Faber, London, 2008, ISBN 9780571239757
When US troops marched into Baghdad and toppled Saddam's regime in April 2003, the international media focused on pockets of cheering Iraqis who brought down statues of Saddam Hussein.
This was the image Washington was keen to promote. US policy makers believed that US forces would be welcomed in Iraq as a liberating force. The US decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and the state machinery under the guise of de-Ba'athification was based on what now appears to have been naïve optimism about the transition process.
What transpired after the fall of Saddam was a catastrophe. Iraq was plunged into civil war with a bloody tally of civilian casualties that grows by the day. The failure of the post-Saddam authority to provide physical security for Iraqi citizens, maintain employment opportunities and food supplies and organise garbage collection, to name a few essentials, has seriously discredited US policy makers.
The US invasion, however, heralded a new era for the Shia majority in Iraq. Constituting over 60 per cent of the population, they had lived under fear and persecution during Saddam's rule. The history of rivalry, and sometimes animosity, between Shia and Sunni Arabs was a critical factor in the course of post-Saddam politics.
This was not news to Patrick Cockburn, a foreign correspondent with the Independent newspaper who has reported on the Middle East for nearly three decades. Cockburn was keenly aware of the sectarian and ethnic loyalties in Iraq and was simply amazed at the level of ignorance among US policy makers.
In this book Cockburn chooses to introduce the reader to that historical background before dealing with Muqtada al-Sadr himself. As a result the reader is treated to an easy-to-read account of Iraq's politics under Saddam, especially the relationship between the Shia and the state.
This account is all the more relevant today because it helps explain the political attitudes of the Iraqi Shia population towards the United States, Shia Iran and the rest of the Arab world. It also contextualises the rapid rise of Muqtada al-Sadr to a position of authority in post-Saddam Iraq.
As Cockburn points out, Saddam's brutal policy of suppressing dissent 'destroyed the secular opposition parties and his own ruinous wars ... discredited secular Arab Nationalism'. So by default, religious figures who had managed to stay alive by not antagonising Saddam were in a