Jun 15 2008
Sadrists Movement Is Dead, Pulls Out Of Elections
Wow – even I did not predict Sadr’s debacle over the last few months was this bad.  I knew he was losing support among the Iraqis (see my previous post here).  But i suspected his recent surrendering to Maliki was an effort to stop the hemorrhaging and buy time to rebuild some credibility.  Apparently it is too late for that because the Sadrist movement is now limping off the Iraqi political stage, too injured from a self-inflicted wound of extremism to survive by popular support:
The movement of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said Saturday that it would not take part in provincial elections this year, one day after it formed a new paramilitary group to fight U.S. troops.
Sadr is clearly a spent political force. Â And his paramilitary group is a joke when it comes to facing the Iraqi forces, let alone the US forces. Â Sadr is infamous for making wild and bold claims, only to crawl away from them when he sees his political base faltering. Â This is all bluster from a man who played his cards wrong and lost. Â It doesn’t matter who long it takes the liberal media to figure it out – Sadr and the Iraqis know (and so do many of us here in the West). Â Â
I would like to point folks to a comment by reader Crosspatch on how badly the liberal media has been duped by Sadr and his followers:
AJ, I found this linked in a comment over at Roggio’s site. I would consider it major. It has been a while since I read Talisman Gate blog, maybe I will put it back on my “morning coffee†list.
Muqtada al-Sadr throws down his arms at Maliki’s feat in the last act of his months-old saga of surrender; he officially disbands the Mahdi Army to everyone’s disbelief, including mine, yet the Washington Post chooses to interpret his submission as a reactivation of his militia.
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But Mr. Paley, the cub reporter with no grounding in Iraqi affairs whose prior wilted laurels were earned reporting on education issues back in the U.S. (…he had to retract some of his reporting, it seems); this hapless wanna-be that’s been dispatched to cover really confusing and convoluted political terrain in the WaPo’s infinite staffing wisdom; has seemingly internalized every high note of the Sadrist chime: no matter what the story may be, Muqtada always wins.
So if Sadr would appear in a YouTube video snuffing himself in a dank apartment somewhere in Qum, the WaPo would run ‘Radical Cleric Sheds Earthly Body, Gains Celestial Powers’ across its masthead.
Good stuff.
Yeah, very good stuff! Mookie Sadr should go back to playing video games. Â He was much better at being Mullah Atari!
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Why would he need to create a new militia? What would be the point of that if the old one could not get the job done, what makes anyone think the new one will do any better?
The way I read it, he isn’t creating a “new” militia so much as he is telling everyone except a select few to disarm. These would probably be the “officers” of the organization. My guess is that he gets a lot of money through that militia and he still needs some armed “enforcers” to collect what extortion sources he still has left.
Our media is so desperate in the face of good news on all fronts that they are working as hard as they can to drive any wedge they can and the current Status of Forces negotiations are one of the few things they have left. So they are taking the Iranian position.
Or it could be that a good deal of the “stringers” they have on the ground are Iranian agents feeding the media outlets with the Iranian view. North Vietnam did that when they managed to get a Colonel in the NV Army as Time Magazine’s bureau chief in Saigon. That isn’t far-fetched conspiracy theory, it is what intelligence agencies do. They work for YEARS to pull that kind of thing off. I noted the other day in a comment here that a reporter for Reuters who seems to write a lot of glowing articles on Sadr had an Iranian last name, not an Iraqi name. Infiltrating media organizations would be a number one priority for Iranian intelligence. It would appear they have been quite successful.