Iraqi Politicians Talk of Limiting Shiite Cleric al-Sadr as Chaos Continues

EDWARD WONG: They are. You're seeing a lot of that, even among some of our own Iraqi staff members. You're seeing them trying to figure out ways to move their families outside of Baghdad or outside the country.

We know a lot of neighborhoods that are undergoing violence, undergoing sectarian cleansing are seeing a lot of movement. You see people -- a lot of Shiites heading south, for example, to holy cities like Najaf or Karbala, where it's very predominantly Shiite, and very heavily controlled by security forces, or militias.

You see a lot of Sunni Arabs moving to Fallujah. We get reports from one of our Iraqi reporters in Fallujah saying he sees large numbers of families coming to the city and asking for residence there. A lot of them stay with other family members or with members of their tribe when they move to these places.

You also see a lot of people going to Syria and Jordan these days.

EDWARD WONG: The Iraqi government has presented a plan to President Bush asking for a drawdown of U.S. forces in the city center. The plan basically asks for the U.S. forces to move to the perimeter of Baghdad and basically act as a guarantor of last resort for the Iraqi government. And the Iraqi government would like to see its own soldiers take over much of the security in the city center.

Now, the fear, of course, is that this would lead to more sectarian cleansing, more sectarian violence. Since the government is at the moment a fairly sectarian government, very heavily Shiite, very conservative Shiite, and they've been asking the U.S. for a long time now to basically let them take control of this, and they say that they can do what it will take to end this war.

RAY SUAREZ: How does that request for a U.S. drawdown mesh with the reports in American papers and the wire services today that the U.S. is considering so-called "doubling down" in Iraq, sending more forces in, at least for the near future?

EDWARD WONG: They're not necessarily mutually exclusive reports, because the Iraqi plan that calls for a U.S. withdrawal to the perimeter of Baghdad could also call for a bolstering of U.S. forces on the outskirts of Baghdad, and also for U.S. forces to concentrate its fight in Anbar Province, for example, where you have a lot of Sunni militant groups working out there.

Obviously, those groups are a direct threat to the Shiite-led government. And they would love to see the U.S. increase forces in a place like Anbar and tamp down on those groups.

At the same time, the reports that we're seeing today about the surge option, as some people call it, or the double-down option, also says the U.S. -- one of the U.S. options is to take on some of the Shiite militias before they draw down their forces again.

So, obviously, that's something that the current Iraqi government would be hesitant to pursue, because it depends on some of these Shiite militias for its backing and its political support.

EDWARD WONG: Well, these talks have been going on for a while now, but they've been gaining momentum recently, partly because of President Bush's direct intervention. He invited a prominent Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to the White House a little earlier. And just yesterday, he met with Tariq al-Hashimi, a prominent Sunni Arab leader.

And what the Americans are trying to do is to get the Iraqis to form a new political alliance, basically a realignment of the political blocs in the parliament, to basically give their unconditional support to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The prime minister right now relies on Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who leads one of these militias, for his political support. But the thinking is among the Americans that, if this moderate -- so-called moderate alliance can give the prime minister political support, then the tie with Muqtada al-Sadr will be broken, and the prime minister and the government, along with the Americans, can move against Muqtada al-Sadr, if they need to.

Now, I know that some people, like the White House, are calling this a moderate alliance. A lot of the groups in the talks right now are not moderate. They have their own very politicized agendas. But one thing they do have in common is that they all want to get rid of Muqtada al-Sadr.