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Spencer Ackerman has a great take on that question today at Washington Independent:

Yet while the political fortunes of all other Iraqi Arab political figures have waxed and waned, only Sadr has consistently gained strength. That raises the question: Why?

One common explanation is that Sadr is the heir to a distinguished Shiite clerical line that offered the most potent and authentic resistance to Saddam Hussein. A complementary theory holds that Sadr's anti-occupation demagoguery provides all the adherent force he needs.

But a different interpretation -- not exclusive of the other two -- might hold the key to Sadr's continued success. Sadr is an insurgent figure who adopts key principles of counterinsurgency. His military strategy is complemented by an appealing political and economic strategy for securing the loyalties of the population. That would help explain why the counterinsurgents battling Sadr in Baghdad have consistently lost.

"While other individuals and parties sought U.S. support and bickered over the high-profile government ministries," A.J. Rossmiller, who spent 2005 in Baghdad as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote an e-mail, "Sadrists quietly sought the three things most valuable in a political system: popular legitimacy, a patronage network and the ability to provide for the basic needs of citizens."

Some counterinsurgents believe that Sadr's own dexterity with counterinsurgency principles, combined with his deep political support in Iraq, make accommodation the only sensible strategy. "The best solution now," said longtime counterinsurgency advocate and former Army officer Terrence Daly, "is to try to coopt Sadr's forces." Defeating him, in other words, is beyond the U.S.'s capabilities.

Its all a much more nuanced and intelligent version of my "they live there, we don't" argument about why we will never defeat al-Sadr's forces.

It is as if Sadr has read the Army and Marine Corps' 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency. Spearheaded by such respected counterinsurgents as Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the manual's central insight is that political and economic measures, and not simply military ones, are what defeats insurgencies. "Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate," the manual states. "Long-term success in COIN [counterinsurgency] depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government's rule. Achieving this condition requires the government to eliminate as many causes of the insurgency as feasible."

But Sadr's appeal is not strictly material. Even if he did not deliver the services he provides, he would still have two potent assets that no other Iraqi political figure jointly possesses. First is his uncompromising anti-occupation stance. Last year, his deputies in Parliament led an effort to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops that won a parliamentary majority -- only to be ignored by Maliki.

More fundamentally, Sadr's family led the religious resistance to Saddam Hussein, with both his father and his uncle becoming high-profile victims of the regime. The Sadrist Current that he helms is a movement in Iraq with roots far deeper than any other organized political entity.

Actually I think this gets it backwards. Our field manual on counterinsurgency is the result of our having studied the ways successful counterinsurgencies operate. The truth is that counterinsurgency is a problem for our military because insurgencies aren't primarily military campaigns. They are first and foremost political operations. To oversimplify things, successful insurgencies understand this distinction, while unsuccessful ones do not. They recognize that if they fight a conflict primarily on military terms they will lose, so they turn to other areas - political and economic - where as natives they have built in strengths.

Some in the counterinsurgency community have come to recognize Sadr's power as an unpleasant fact that the U.S. must learn to live with. They view him less like an Islamic zealot determined to thwart America and more like an organized-crime boss.

"Like a local mob boss, he established local security, doled out jobs and tapped into the widespread distrust of government (and of course the U.S.) among the population," Rossmiller wrote. "When there's a war going on these things tend to be thought of as counterinsurgency measures, but more generally we think of them as the basic requirements for any government or group to claim authority."

Daly, the former Army officer, believes a similar outlook holds the seeds for future strategy. To view Sadr as an enemy to be defeated instead of a challenge to mitigate, is to risk compounding the U.S.'s mistakes, in his view. "It will be a little like Elliott Ness in Chicago in the 1920s telling Al Capone that his mob can have the rackets as long as they tamp down street crime," he said, "but we and the Iraqis will just have to do the best we can to attain the longterm U.S. goal."

No one, of course, has figured out how to eradicate organized crime.

Actually, to some extent they did figure it out in the 1920s. Organized crime exploded in the 1920 thanks to prohibition, and when it was ended in 1933 the black market atop which Capone's empire was built collapsed. The crime fighters won when they redefined what was a crime. We recognized that we couldn't win the war on alcohol, so we simply stopped fighting. And in so doing, we won - at least for the moment - the war on organized crime. And there is a lesson in there for us today, isn't there?