sensitive cases
Of course, the significance of the Imam 'Ali Shrine is missed in the US media. Some would indicate that it is comparable to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I think it is comparable to the Church and the Vatican combined: because the Mosque had emerged from the days of Harun Ar-Rashid of the Abbasid Empire not only as a destination for pilgrims but also as a center for religious learning, even when Saddam tried his best to marginalize it. Cheney must have thought that this would only take hours: these were the same people who dismissed As-Sadr as a small-town cleric with no popular base. Yet, US-commissioned polls in Iraq indicated to them that he was wildly popular, and became only more popular after US campaigns against him. Nothing can boost your popularity in the Middle East more than US hostility against you.
The Angry Arab News Service 12.Aug.04
link Left I
Al-Sadr, or As-Sadr, was headed for this all along. All it required was unwavering moral strength and piety, then everything else became inevitable.
What needs to be asked, again and again until it's answered, is whether or not these events are intentional. Not accidents, not the result of incompetence and greed, but something far more dangerous and threatening.
There's much talk about how idiotic the Americans were not to have realized al-Sadr would become a hero to the Muslim world, and to young Arabs especially, but no one suggests that it was calculated, that the estimates were that he could be beaten, to great advantage for the aggressors. Just as no one suggests that the worldwide publication of images of Iraqi men being degraded by women and dogs was calculated. That it was not so much an uncovering of criminal sadism, as a flaunting of power over the powerless by a sadistic conqueror, using American soldiers, and dogs, and an enthusiastic media.
Cheney has the face of an evil man, and he's clearly a very powerful personality, but I don't believe he's the tyrant behind all this. There may not even be a tyrant. Not a human one anyway.
It's going to be unmistakable soon that al-Sadr is right, morally right, and the foundations of Western legal systems make him legally right as well.
This is an immoral criminal invasion, and it won't stop with the destruction of Iraq, and it isn't about oil. It's about empire.
Those of us who thought this from the beginning have been able to predict each bloody step. What I personally have a hard time with is how obvious it seems and yet how angry people become when it's suggested that this may in fact be on purpose, that it may have very little to do with American political interest in the Middle East and everything to do with Israeli political exigencies. There has been public assertion of this by serious men in position to know. It's laughed away.
It's happening right in front of the entire world, and no one's doing anything about it but pretend that it isn't.
Or, in the case of the al-Sadr brigades, giving their lives to stop it.
