Well, it should be damn interesting to see how the liberal SurrenderMedia spins this news into claims that Iraq is turning into another Vietnam. It seems the Mahdi Army in Sadr City has surrendered - completely:
Followers of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr agreed late Friday to allow Iraqi security forces to enter all of Baghdad’s Sadr City and to arrest anyone found with heavy weapons in a surprising capitulation that seemed likely to be hailed as a major victory for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.
In return, Sadr’s Mahdi Army supporters won the Iraqi government’s agreement not to arrest Mahdi Army members without warrants, unless they were in possession of “medium and heavy weaponry.”
The agreement would end six weeks of fighting in the vast Shiite Muslim area that’s home to more than 2 million residents and would mark the first time that the area would be under government control since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. On Friday, 15 people were killed and 112 were injured in fighting, officials at the neighborhoods two major hospitals said.
It also would be a startling turnaround in fortunes for Maliki, who’d been widely criticized for picking a fight with Sadr’s forces, first in the southern port city of Basra and then in Sadr City.
Members of Maliki’s Dawa Party and the powerful Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq met with Sadr officials on Thursday and Friday to come up with a 14-point agreement to end the weeks of fighting, …
What is interesting is how this sudden capitulation comes one day after aids to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr lashed out at the top Shiite cleric in all of Iraq and basically claimed he shared the guilty for the deaths in Sadr City because he had sided with Maliki and the US forces. This was an astounding and dangerous step for Sadr to take. Was this act of defiance too much for the powers to be, which decided it was time to end the fighting? Was Iran getting nervous about the building fire power the US was gathering in the region with the addition of another Carrier Group?
It was probably a combination of these factors, along with the fact that the Iraqi people were not rising up to side with Sadr and the Mahdi thugs, but instead were relieved when they Mahdi thugs were dispatched and the Iraqi government took control. Sadr was doomed from the beginning - as I predicted. He had no support among the mainstream Shiite leadership. The minute the Grand Ayatollah Sistani distanced himself from Sadr and his Militia and sided with the rule of law Sadr was through. Without Sistani’s blessing there would be no uprising, there would be isolation for Sadr and the Mahdi Army.
So Maliki and the US have taken on and beaten the Mahdi Army which now agrees to disarm as Maliki directed. Will there be cheering in the streets of Sadr City on this finale? You bet there will be, along with a new sense of pride in the Iraqi government. The second biggest losers in all this were the doom&gloom liberal SurrenderMedia and Surrendercrats. The world just won’t produce another Vietnam for them. Their predictions were wrong - again. And their hopes of a US failure in Iraq were wrong - as they have always been. Wrong in a smelly, sick kind of way.
What will be interesting to watch is: (1) the liberal SurrenderMedia eat crow as Iraq passes another milestone towards its bright, free future, (2) seeing the people of Iraq enjoy the new peaceful Iraq that will be arising again soon, and (3) learning exactly what it was that caused the Mahdi to fold like a lawn chair. Someone pulled the plug on this one.
They won’t eat crow. In my paper, the story was buried on page A-8 with no headline, at the back end of an article “Al Qaeda leader still free!” Bad headline, check. Negative story, check. Bungling in Iraq, check. Then, “oh by the way, Sadr City surrendered without a fight, although we don’t know why.” And then the obligatory “of course in Iraq it will take time to see what this really means.”
No it won’t, and you know it, you liars. That’s why you worked so hard to bury it. You know it, we know it, the Iraqi’s know it. Even the Iranians know it, which is probably why they’ve opened a second front in Lebanon. The press in this country has finally gone completely ’round the bend - they no longer exist to print news. Their *only* deliberate purpose now is to deliberately distort and, as needed, intentionally manufacture lies to promote a political agenda.
And they revel in it.
They cannot be reformed.
Left by WWS on May 10th, 2008