Five things you need to know to understand the latest violence in Iraq

Heavy fighting has spread across Baghdad and southern Iraq over the last few days. US forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and six other cities are under curfew. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra. There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. The conflict is one that the US media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The conflict doesn't conform to the analysis by US officials in the heavily-fortified Green Zone. It also doesn't fit into the simplistic but popular narrative of a country wrought by sectarian violence, and its nature is obscured by the labels that the commercial media uncritically apply to the disparate centers of Iraqi resistance to the occupation. To better understand the nature of this latest round of conflict, here are five things one needs to know about what's taking place across Iraq. 1. Sectarian violence is rooted in political conflict. Iraq, which had experienced little sectarian-based violence prior to the US invasion, has since been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq's formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and "sectarian violence" has become the accepted media narrative for the instability that has plagued the country. But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists -- with Moqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice–and what might be called Iraqi separatists, represented by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (SIIC or ISCI). The separatists envision a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least four semiautonomous and sectarian-based regional entities, welcome the privatization of the Iraqi energy sector (and the rest of the Iraqi economy) and rely on foreign support to maintain their power. Nationalists desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country's vast oil reserves, and forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq's political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces. The nationalists represent a majority in Iraq's parliament. 2. The US is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform As was once the case in Vietnam, the United States is backing an unpopular and decidedly undemocratic government in Iraq, and that simple fact explains much of the violent resistance that's going on in Iraq today. It's vitally important to understand that Sadr's popularity and legitimacy is a result of his having a platform that's favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis. Most Iraqis favor a strong central government free of the influence of militias, oppose (by a 2-1 margin) the privatization of Iraq's energy sector, favor swift withdrawal of US forces, oppose the ideology of Osama bin Laden, and (to a lesser degree) Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs. With the exception of their opposition to al-Qaida, the separatist parties that make up Maliki's governing coalition are on the deeply unpopular side of these issues. One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Moqtada al-Sadr as a "renegade," "radical" or "militant" cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. He has certainly been willing to use violence in the past, but the "firebrand" label belies the fact that Sadr has forcefully rejected sectarian conflict and sought to bring together representatives of Iraq's various ethnic and sectarian groups in an effort to create real national reconciliation -- a process that the highly sectarian Maliki regime has failed to engage in. 3. Iraq's military forces are, in fact, Iranian- and US-backed Shiite militias. Every headline about the current conflict has featured some variation of the storyline of "Iraqi security forces" battling "Shiite militias." But in reality it is a fight between Shite militias: nationalists in civilian clothes battling separatists in Iraqi army uniforms. It is a great irony of the occupation that "our man in Baghdad" is also Tehran's. Maliki heads the Dawa Party, which has long enjoyed close ties to Iran, and relies on support from SIIC, a staunchly pro-Iranian party, and its powerful Badr militia. The SIIC is headed by Abdul Aziz al Hakim, who spent 22 years prior to the overthrow of Saddam exiled in Iran. Despite his close ties with Tehran, Hakim was invited to the White House in December of 2006, where he was feted by Bush himself. The "government crackdown" in Basra is actually an escalation of a long-simmering conflict between the Badr Brigade, the Sadrists and the Fadhila Party, an offshoot of the Sadrist movement vying for power in the oil-rich South. 4. Maliki's attempt to criminalize dissent. It's inaccurate to say that Moqtada al Sadr "chose" this conflict. The reality is that while his Mahdi Army was holding to a cease-fire, attacks on and detentions of Sadrists continued unabated. Sadr renewed the cease-fire last month, but he did so over the urging of his top aides, who argued that their movement was threatened with annihilation. Ahmed al-Massoudi, a Sadrist member of Parliament, accused the government of planning a military campaign in collaboration with the SIIC's Badr Corps to liquidate the Sadrists. Sadr called for nationwide nonviolent civil disobedience that would have allowed his followers to flex some political muscle. The Maliki regime responded by saying that individuals joining the nationwide strike would be punished and that those organizing it are in violation of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Act issued in 2005. A spokesman for the prime minister promised to punish any government employees who failed to show up for work. This is consistent with the US-backed government's long-term trend of obstructing political reconciliation. 4. Maliki is imposing a Colombia-style democracy. The "crackdown" comes on the heels of the approval of a new law which calls for provincial elections in October, and the winners of those elections will determine the future of the Iraqi state. Control of the country's oil wealth, and how its treasure will be developed, will also be significantly influenced by the outcome of the elections. Iraqi separatists -- Dawa, SIIC and others -- are expected to do poorly in the regional elections, while the Sadrists are widely anticipated to make significant gains. It's a relatively straightforward story: Maliki's goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit US approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold the vote. It is widely perceived by those loyal to Sadr that this is an attempt to wipe out the movement he leads prior to the elections and minimize the influence that Iraqi nationalists are poised to gain. Ahmed al-Massoudi told Voices of Iraq that the officers of the Badr militias had merged recently into security agencies to launch a military campaign whose real objective is to liquidate the Sadrist bloc.