Muqtada Al-Sadr is a thug - let's be clear. He is a smart thug, since he has the ability to reverse course when he meets resistance and seek and exploit every opportunity that comes his way. But he also understands that power in his country comes from the perception of strength - as well his ability to supply services through a patriarchal network of loyalties. He seems to be the most adept politician currently in Iraq performing this role - but at the cost of total & permanent loyalty to him - or else.

Al-Sadr is mainly in a battle with the other religious power in Iraq - Ayatollah Al-Sistani in Najaf. Whoever wins this struggle wins the allegiance of the Shia in Iraq which translates into control of the religious taxes there. That is the real money side of the issue. The other prize is theological control - but Sadr is much too low a cleric to grab for that yet.

If you understand this - then the other part of the story becomes clear - the Hezbollah comparison. Apt because Al-Sadr, as with Hezbollah in Lebanon, receives much support from their benefactors in Iran - the ones that really pull the strings of both these groups. If you view this struggle as Iran trying to wrest control from Sistani for the Arab part of the Shia soul (loyality to Qum instead of to Najaf), then you get a clearer picture of the situation.

Muqtada Al-Sadr represents the perfect front man for Iran - with an Iraqi nationalist face - as described well in the article. He gets what he wants - power and total control.

And he doesn't mind sacrificing his supporters to get there.

The sad part of this is that he could be doing the same thing - doling out services and helping his people without relying on his militia to do anything other than root out corruption and protect his followers. But maybe when the crunch comes - because sooner or later his militia is going to get silenced by an Iraqi government - he will reverse course again and just be a politician.

You have to keep reminding yourself what the Bush vision was. Let's see, bomb them, and invade. Get rid of Saddam. Seize control. So somewhere in there, we 'controlled' Iraq. You remember. "Mission Accomplished"?

Unfortunately, it seems clear that beyond this, Bush thought that Iraqis would want to be like us. They didn't really like being Shia and Sunni, or Muslims, or whatever. They wanted our form of government, even though it was a result of Christian history, Protestant Reformation, and Enlightenment within that context. This vision, no matter how murky, was enough to invade Iraq.

Now, essentially, we just want a functioning government. We want something short of outright civil war. We want something where terrorists don't run the show. If we left, would al-Sadr find al-Zarqawi and publicly torture him to death? We don't know. We don't how Iraq works, and it is evolving. No matter what we do, now, we don't know what will happen in Iraq. In point of fact, Muqtada Al-Sadr probably has a much better idea, and he is nudging us in directions he thinks will help him. So, basically, there is nothing that will carry us to where Bush wanted to go, but Al-Sadr has a decent chance of getting control of Iraq. This is what the only Super-power army, and 1 trillion dollars, buys you these days. Pretty impressive, huh?

What is clear is that our vision, the grand Secular state based on Western Ideals, did not quite 'take'.

If we truly love democracy, we should learn to live with this sort of thing. We should try to shape it, as best we can. We should encourage economic development as a means of realizing Islamic ideals, as opposed to violence. But that goes without saying. How much can we isolate Islam, make pre-emptive demands on it, and still provide some other path than violence?

Actually, if we learn something of what Islam wants, in Iraq, it's not a total loss. There are tensions in Islam. We should be helping the people, in Islam, who help us.

We should define what we want in Iraq, now. Finally.

This is very complicated, but as I understand it, Al-sadr is a Shiite, that is, he is on the side that we are supporting. His forces are intertwined with the security forces that the U.S. is backing in Iraq. The insurgents, so to speak, are mostly Sunni. I suppose the concusion of the article then, is that we are insane to be in the middle of this? What exactly is the current "hoped for" outcome from the war in Iraq? Lets remember, when this thing started, the Kurdish region was operating as a semiautonomous zone. How is this war going to be better than merely following through on the path to break up Iraq?

Al-Sadr really wasn't our problem, until we decided to jump in and make him one.

The US shut down his newspaper for being a little too angry (but he didn't call for attacks on troops). Then, when Israel assassinated an old man in a wheelchair, he announced he supported Hamas (which got him some popularity). The US would have none of this, and immediately moved to arrest him and started rounding up his followers. Al-Sadr lived through this before, his father and brothers and uncle were killed by Saddam Hussein.

He barricaded himself inside the Shi'ite holy shrine of Ali (may God be pleased with him). Iyad Allawi decides to lose all tactfulness and cheerleads the US, basically telling them to bomb it. Shias around the world protest, the US looks like Yazid (if you don't know who he is, then why are we in Iraq?!), Allawi loses re-election badly, and Al-Sadr gains respect from everyone for standing up to the US, and the US backs down.

Up until the sectarian conflict where Sunni shrines were burned down by shias and taken over in other cases, things were not so bad. Now they're really awful.

In all the grand sceming and dreaming that went into the invasion of Iraq, did any "bright light" in Washington ever consider the importance of having running water and electricity as a key element in "nation-building"?