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First, a quick update from the NYT:

Sharp fighting broke out in the Sadr City district of Baghdad on Sunday as American and Iraqi troops sought to control neighborhoods used by Shiite militias to fire rockets and mortars into the nearby Green Zone.

But the operation failed to stop the attacks on the heavily fortified zone, headquarters for Iraq's central government and the American Embassy here. By day's end, at least two American soldiers had been killed and 17 wounded in the zone, one of the worst daily tolls for the American military in the most heavily protected part of Baghdad. Altogether, at least three American soldiers were killed and 31 wounded in attacks in Baghdad on Sunday, and at least 20 Iraqis were killed, mostly in Sadr City...

The attacks also came as Iraq's national security council intensified pressure on the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of the political group led by Moktada Al-Sadr, the powerful anti-American Shiite cleric, to disarm. In a statement, the council declared that all political parties must immediately dissolve their militias and surrender their weapons if they wish to take part in elections.

It's worth stopping here to note that Al-Sadr isn't anti-American so much as he is anti-occupation. If we weren't occupying his country, its virtually certain that he would not care about the US one way or the other. The wording used here by the NYT is quite misleading.

Violence in Sadr City first flared more than a week ago after Mr. Maliki began a poorly coordinated military campaign to retake the southern port city of Basra from Shiite militias.

The fighting in Baghdad had calmed considerably in recent days. On Sunday morning, though, Iraqi troops backed by an American Stryker squadron moved through a southern section of Sadr City, and were met by militia fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons.

After the Iraqi soldiers came under attack, American forces in Abrams tanks, Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles rumbled to the scene. An American helicopter fired at least two Hellfire missiles at militia fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, and blasted one of their vehicles. Later at least one militia-fired rocket hit the Jamilla market, a heavily frequented part of Sadr City, where clashes left at least 20 people dead, Iraqi officials said.

A large whoosh from a rocket disrupted a briefing in Sadr City for a small group of reporters, prompting correspondents and soldiers to duck. The news conference at the lone American Army and Iraqi combat outpost in Sadr City was given by Gen. Abud Qanbar Hashim, the Iraqi commander for Baghdad, and Maj. Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond, who leads the American division charged with securing the capital, and began as bursts of gunfire rattled nearby streets.

General Hammond explained later that the projectile was probably an errant 107-millimeter rocket aimed at the Green Zone and launched from north Sadr City.

Mr. Maliki has issued a series of seemingly inconsistent decrees in recent days about his willingness to take on militias. General Abud said the Iraqi operations in Sadr City were not aimed at any specific political movement. The statement seemed intended to reassure Mr. Sadr's followers, but General Abud insisted that Iraqi security forces would take action against any militia brandishing arms.

"The main thing is that arms should be in the hands of the state," he said. "And we will never allow any armed group to carry arms as an alternative to the state to provide security to the citizens."

This prompted Sandy Levinson at Balkinization to respond:

This, of course, is pure Max Weber, who defined the state as possessing a monopoly over the legitimate use of the means of violence. As I've suggested in earlier posts, General Abud's heartfelt comment makes no sense unless those supporting militias in fact trust "the state to provide security to the citizens," and there is no particular reason, I suggest, for any given group in Iraq to have such a sense of trust. Even Shi'ites, obviously, are now at war with one another because they don't trust their religious compatriots sufficiently.

Iraq's national security council "declared that all political parties must immediately dissolve their militias and surrender their weapons if they wish to take part in elections. " Ask yourself what the response in the United States in 1789 to a statement by George Washington and his Federalist colleagues that no one would be allowed to vote in the first set of elections without surrendering his weapons to the national government. It was, of course, the fear of something like that that led to the Second Amendment, a truly important part of the Constitution, historically.

One can deny any relevance of this aspect of our own history, but I obviously think that is an error. Most embarrassed, of course, should be political conservatives who support a robust reading of the Amendment even in our own time. But even political liberals, who would prefer that the Second Amendment just go away, should still explain why groups mistrustful of the Iraqi central government should acquiesce to the demand for disarmament before it is at all clear what the terms of the new Iraqi political reality are. The IRA finally did agree to disarm in Northern Ireland, but only after it had become relatively clear what the new reality would be (and that Catholics would be treated fairly in it).

I can't speak for anyone else, but as a "political liberal," I wouldn't prefer that the 2nd Amendment simply go away. Not at all. What I would prefer is that it be interpreted and understood in light of the historical circumstances under which it was written. Back in 1789, arms were important because for precisely the reason that Levinson outlines above: it was not at all clear what the terms of the new American political reality were. That made the 2nd Amendment both necessary and essential. It also makes it largely irrelevant today. And as a "political liberal," I wish that simple fact were recognized by all sides in the debate.

On Iraq, I think Levinson has it exactly right. Until political reconciliation occurs, its hard to image any of the militias giving up their arms, because to do so is to potentially sign your own death warrant. Sadr knows this, which is why he is responding to al-Maliki's latest demands like this:

The prime minister [al-Maliki] said in an interview with CNN aired Monday that Sadr must disband the Mahdi Army, his powerful militia, in order to participate in provincial elections scheduled to take place in October.

An aide to Sadr said the cleric is willing to disband the militia if his religious leaders sign off on the move and if the Iraqi government meets certain unspecified conditions, Hasan al-Zargani, a top Sadr aide said in a phone interview from Iran.

"The government should give a number of guarantees for dissolving [the Mahdi Army] because dissolving the army is not an easy thing to do," Zargani said.

The Post is spinning this under the tag "radical Shiite cleric says he would disband militia if senior religious leaders ordered it," but that's clearly only half the story, and the unimportant half at that. Sadr surely knows that unless there are clear guarantees that his followers will be both allowed to fully participate in the political process and protected against reprisals, his fellow Shiite leaders won't order the militias to disband. This strikes me as a clever political ploy and nothing more. Not that I expect either our media or our pro-war politicians to understand that.

As for the connection between participating in elections and disbanding the militias, here's how Middle East expert Juan Cole frames this:

AP reports that Iraq's national security council, including the major Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni parties, on Sunday said that parties maintaining militias would not be allowed to contest the provincial elections in October. This move is a way of putting pressure on the Sadr Movement to disarm the Mahdi Army. But it may well backfire, since most Shiites in the south now appear to support the Sadrists. Excluding that party from the elections will more or less disenfranchise a majority of Iraqis.

Liwa' al-Sumaysim, of the Sadr Movement, told al-Zaman that the Sadrists did not accept the authority of the National Security Council to issue such an ultimatum. He said that although the Sadrists do not believe in deploying militias for political purposes, the Mahdi Army was created because the Iraqi government is not providing security to neighborhoods, and that has not changed. When al-Zaman asked Sumaysim what would happen if the Sadrists were excluded from the elections, he replied that the Sadr Movement reserved the right to take up arms against the Occupier.

Sumaysim said that all the parties making this demand have their own militias, and he is more or less correct. The Kurds are not going to disband their Peshmerga paramilitary, which they have gotten recognized as the national guard of Kurdistan. ISCI is not going to disarm the Badr Corps, which has been infiltrated into the army and provincial police. Etc., etc. The Sadrists are a little unlikely to volunteer to be the only ones to disarm. But apparently they are being threatened with a US military campaign if they decline.

I can understand why al-Maliki and the Kurds might take this approach, but I cannot for the life of me understand why we would not only go along with it, but back it up with the use of military force.

Gen. Petraeus, the Bush administration, John McCain, and others will point to the connection between Sadr and Iran. As I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions, this simply makes no sense. On the one hand, many of the militias that we have declared acceptable are even more closely aligned with Iran that is Sadr's Mahdi Army. On the other hand, there's very little actual evidence that Iran is actualyl providing much support to Sadr. Back to Cole:

This fixation on Iran just doesn't make any sense to me. The poor slum kids and Marsh Arabs in Basra who follow Muqtada al-Sadr don't even like Iranians. The primary Iran-linked force in Basra is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq with its Badr Corps militia, which most Basrans code as Iranian puppets. One of my Iraqi correspondents told me that when the Badr Corps was fighting Marsh Arabs, local Basrans characterized it as 'Iranians fighting Iraqis.' The Badr Corps, according to the Iraqi press, fought alongside al-Maliki's 14th Division against the Mahdi Army. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and it is alleged that many Badr Corps fighters are still on the Iranian payroll.

Iranians come through Basra on their way up to Karbala and Najaf on pilgrimage to sacred Shiite shrines, and a handful may have gotten caught up in the fighting. This sort of thing has happened before. [8,000 Iranian pilgrims caught in Iraq because of the fighting have just been recalled home, and a temporary halt on the pilgrimages has been called.) But that Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran deliberately sent Iranian troops or agents into Basra to undermine ISCI, Badr, and al-Maliki's Da'wa (Islamic Missionary) Party on behalf of the Sadr Movement just strikes me as daft. It flies in the face of everything else we know about the relationship of these groups with Iran.

In fact, the Iranian leadership benefits from a united Iraqi Shiite community and the head of the Expediency Council, Akbar Rafsanajani, expressed concern about the faction-fighting among Iraqi Shiites. Iran brokered the cease-fire. If it wanted Shiite on Shiite fighting, why would it do that?

Neither the US nor Britain any longer has good intelligence on what is happening in the slums of Basra. If Petraeus is getting his information from al-Maliki on all this, he should be careful. The Da'wa and ISCI are perfectly capable of doing propaganda to embroil the US in their fights. In fact, their lies helped draw the US in, in the first place.

The US Institute of Peace concluded in a just-released report that there has been little political progress in Iraq, and that the US risks, as a result, being bogged down there for 5 to 10 years. If critics of the US presence are correct, Having so many US troops in Iraq may actually be delaying the compromises that Iraqis desperately need to make with one another. As it is, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki knows that he can just have the US Air Force bomb his enemies; he doesn't need to come to an agreement with them.

As you watch the debate over Gen. Petraeus testimony this week, keep that last sentence in mind. So long as PM al-Maliki knows he can use the US military to destroy his political enemies, he has absolutely no reason to come to terms with them. Worse, he has every reason not to. And so we must ask ourselves: how many more lives, and how much more money, are we willing to spend to ensure that one Iraqi faction closely aligned with Iran defeats another Iraqi faction much less closely aligned with Iran? And how does doing so improve our own national security? If we cannot clearly answer those questions, I do not see how we can continue to stay.