{"id":119,"date":"2008-01-07T21:55:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T05:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/archives\/119"},"modified":"2008-01-07T21:55:30","modified_gmt":"2008-01-08T05:55:30","slug":"al-sadr-truce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/archives\/119","title":{"rendered":"al-Sadr Truce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the Democratic debate on Saturday night.  There was a question about how things are going better in Iraq now, perhaps thanks to the surge, and what that meant to the candidates Iraq plans.  There were some good answers, but I was surprised by an omission.<\/p>\n<p>Moktada al-Sadr, the head of the Mahdi army, declared a unilateral six month cease-fire back in August (<a href=\"\/\/http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/09\/01\/world\/middleeast\/01iraq.html\">I found this article about it in a quick search<\/a>).  It seems to me that al-Sadr has been one of the major destabilizing forces in Iraq, the other being Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  When al-Sadr deliberately stopped the attacks of the Mahdi army, naturally things got somewhat better.<\/p>\n<p>The questions are: did al-Sadr declare the cease-fire because of the surge, and will he hold to it after the six months are up?  I don&#8217;t know the answers; I don&#8217;t know of any evidence either way.  But I&#8217;m surprised that the candidates didn&#8217;t mention it.  Naturally when one of the major destabilizing forces stops fighting, things get better.  It&#8217;s not obvious that the surge is making things better, although I hope that it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the Democratic debate on Saturday night. There was a question about how things are going better in Iraq now, perhaps thanks to the surge, and what that meant to the candidates Iraq plans. There were some good answers, but I was surprised by an omission. Moktada al-Sadr, the head of the Mahdi army, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}