Iraqi Prime Minister's actions show true state of affairs in war-torn nation
Part of Our World Dan Rather

On April 8, little more than a week from now, Gen. David Petraeus, the supreme U.S. military commander in Iraq, will appear before Congress to offer his assessment of the situation in that country and his recommendations going forward.

But if you want to get a sense of how things are going in Iraq, how things are really going and how they might turn out, you might not have to wait for the general's testimony.

Just keep a close eye on Basra and the fallout from that fight.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to take on the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army can be seen as representing progress.

It is a difficult move, politically, for the Shiite prime minister and one that signals he is willing to confront the Shiite militias that have exacerbated both the security picture and sectarian tensions in Iraq.

The Basra offensive is not only potentially key to asserting the authority of Iraq's central government.

It is also a near economic necessity, given that Basra, as Iraq's main Persian Gulf port, is essential to getting Iraq's oil to market.

Dealing with the situation in Basra, which has deteriorated in the wake of the British army's handover of power - and doing it in advance of provincial elections now scheduled for October - shows rare decisiveness on the part of Iraq's leader (whether it was initially his idea, as has been reported, or that of the United States).

In the short term, this could be seen as a positive sign. In the mid and long term, the Basra offensive promises to tell us more.

For one, it should give us a clearer sense of the state of Iraq's armed forces, which Americans have been waiting to "stand up so we can stand down" for years now.

U.S. and British forces are said to be playing a solely advisory and support role, including air power.

Just as significantly, battling Sadr's forces may provide a good indication of how strong or fragile is the security progress made by President Bush's so-called surge. The cease-fire that Sadr imposed on his militia last summer has been a factor in that progress; if Sadr lifts that cease-fire in response to the government's offensive, the relative calm that Baghdad has known in recent months could well become a thing of the past.

The battles in Baghdad's Sadr city, home to the militia, portend this already.

Like most of the battles that have raged inside Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the fight for Basra is rife with complexity.

It has a substantial political dimension for Maliki, whose coalition government came to power in large part due to Sadr's support.

Among the questions that will be left in the aftermath of this campaign is whether Maliki's government can hold without the Sadrite bloc. That is a pretty big question to have out there, as the U.S. contemplates the near- and farterm future of our military commitment in Iraq.

This power struggle of Shiite against Shiite is a change from the usual Shiite-Sunni-Kurd triangle.

On the one hand it shows us an Iraqi leader determined, it seems, to face lingering threats to central rule from Baghdad. And on the other hand, it underlines just what a fractious and factionalized mess Iraq is still, five years after we toppled the strongman who held it together in his brutal, bloody fist.

In his upcoming congressional testimony, Gen. Petraeus is expected to recommend pausing the drawdown of U.S. troops from their surge and pre-surge levels.

Basra and its potential blowback may illustrate just why our men and women in uniform can't yet come home.

Dan Rather, a Wharton native, was Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years. His column appears by arrangement with King Features Syndicate.