Few Tears For Muqtada And His Army

A Comment
By Tony Sayegh

It was obvious, and it was stated on this blog weeks ago, that the main objective of the "surge" was to destroy Muqtada and his Mahdi army. It is the latest phase of the successful American strategy of having Iraqis destroy each other. Frankly, while most Arabs supported Muqtada in 2004 when he fought the occupation in Najaf, I don't think that he can count on that support today.

A lot has changed since then: Muqtada and his army became the major source of death squads; he became an important player in the occupation-imposed sectarian government; his death squads are ethnically cleansing Baghdad and other areas; his death squads have been terrorizing and killing innocent Palestinians in Baghdad who have no place to go; in spite of his empty rhetoric about ending the occupation, his Mahdi army relies on active support of the U.S. Army as seen just days ago when it called for U.S. air strikes on Haifa street in Baghdad; he cast his lot with Iran instead of forming a united front with the Iraqi resistance and that introduced its own set of contradictions since Iran (and SCIRI) favor Iraq's partitioning (euphemistically called federalism); and finally how can we forget the barbaric scenes of Muqtada's thugs chanting his name during the grizzly lynching and subsequent slaughter of Saddam. The last item was, of course, stage-managed, to demonize Muqtada (not a hard task) and justify the forthcoming U.S. move to destroy his army.

Few tears will be shed for Muqtada and his army this time.