Thursday, April 08, 2004
Inside Iraq
Winds of Change has a fascinating analysis of the current situation and its implications for the future of Iraq. It is rich with links, and includes a lot of history of Al Sadr and his organization, and the probable role of Iran in all of this. I strongly recommend taking five minutes to read the whole thing.
The post makes one point that is actually a distraction from the main arguments of the essay, but worth repeating here:
One of the more popular fallacies now being argued is that it was the closure of his newspaper that led Sadr into his current period of radical activities - in fact, his Mahdi Army had already demolished the village of Kawlia a full day earlier. To date, US forces have been engaging Sadr's followers in Baghdad as well as in and around An Najaf, but he still commands a formidable force of anywhere between 1,000-7,000 fighters, with a number of media reports and Healing Iraq claiming that he is being supported in these efforts by Iran and its proxy arm Hezbollah. Ignoring that this is arguably an act of war against the United States, so long as Sadr continues to receive support from his Iranian backers he is likely to remain a threat for the near-term future.
The New York Times apparently did not feel it necessary to mention the destruction of Kawlia when it argued that the closing of the newspaper was "a recklessly bad idea" and the catalyst for the latest troubles.
The post makes one point that is actually a distraction from the main arguments of the essay, but worth repeating here:
One of the more popular fallacies now being argued is that it was the closure of his newspaper that led Sadr into his current period of radical activities - in fact, his Mahdi Army had already demolished the village of Kawlia a full day earlier. To date, US forces have been engaging Sadr's followers in Baghdad as well as in and around An Najaf, but he still commands a formidable force of anywhere between 1,000-7,000 fighters, with a number of media reports and Healing Iraq claiming that he is being supported in these efforts by Iran and its proxy arm Hezbollah. Ignoring that this is arguably an act of war against the United States, so long as Sadr continues to receive support from his Iranian backers he is likely to remain a threat for the near-term future.
The New York Times apparently did not feel it necessary to mention the destruction of Kawlia when it argued that the closing of the newspaper was "a recklessly bad idea" and the catalyst for the latest troubles.
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