Moqtada to the security forces: Join us

The statement by Moqtada alSadr read out in a Baghdad square and published today (Tuesday April 8) makes what is essentially a two-part argument: First, our aim is a society in which Iraqis--including in the security forces--do not treat other Iraqis as their enemies. But given the scope and severity of the Maliki government's preparations, it appears likely that kind of fitna-inducing violence could well result from a mass march tomorrow. For that reason, it will be postponed.

After the opening general denunciation of the occupier and what he has done by way of killing and destruction, Moqtada alSadr continues:

...and they have spread fitna among us, and brought with them this project that they call "democracy", which they have made an arm to strike against the Iraqi people and to oppress and evict them, and to arrest them either themselves or by bands of their paid servants...But I am convinced that our genuine Iraqi army and police, [people] who have God and love of their country in their hearts, and treat the Iraqi people as their brothers, have not, and will not, raise their hand to kill or to arrest their sons and brothers--indeed, their fathers and mothers--and have not, and will not, stain their hands with the blood of their people, or torture them in the pits of the American prisons or elsewhere, as the occupiers have done to us, and before them the haddam (?)

Because look, you brave army and you patient police of Iraq,we have opened our hearts to you with love and we have held out to you our hand, now with olive branches and now with the holy book. Are you among those who love alIslaam wa assalaam, because if you are so, then I invite you to come to the aid of your brothers who are besieged, and to the aid of your sons who have been arrested, and to the aid of the wounded whom the hospitals and the doctors and nurses of Iraq are unable to cope with. Be like a single hand together with your brothers the mujahideen for the liberation of Iraq and for its independence and its unity in land and people, and there will be no separation between us on account of elections, or democracy, or America or the occupation, or the discredited [people] or Baathists, or the loathsome sectarian parties. May God reward you, and I ask him to make you an arm of Iraq and of its people and its land, and not of the occupation and its sins. Obedience to God is above all things.

The foregoing is one part [of what I have to say], the other part is this: We have seen the scope of the security dispositions that the "Maliki" government has put in place, and the scale of his escalation against the people in every part of Iraq, as if the people of Iraq and every single individual were a wanted person...

And his point is that given the lengths the Maliki government is going to, there is a significant risk of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence--the thing to be avoided at all cost, for the reasons that he explained in the first part. Hence the postponement. And he invites "the government of Iraq, if it exists" to change course and protect the people from the bombings and the American militias and the "companies" behind which they hide, and to demand the withdrawal of the occupation forces or at least a schedule for their withdrawal, and turn their attention to providing services for the people.

In other words, this is a statement that says: First, Iraqis including those in police and the army are brothers, and last thing in the world that should be tolerated is for them to be at each others' throats. But the "government, if it exists" is currently at most a mere shadow of the occupation, one of whose aims is the "spreading of fitna among us", so that a mass march at this point would risk letting them foment just that kind of violence. The postponement is thus for the sake of unity. And in this connection there is also the continuing invitation to the Iraqi forces to do what many of them did in the Basra and Baghdad situations of the last two weeks: Refuse to fight other Iraqis.

What the western media has reported is the second part of this argument, leaving out the first part entirely, for reasons that surely don't need to be spelled out.