By Juan Cole
"I could never understand why the members of the Republican Party in the US were so delirious with joy that their president had installed the Da'wa Party in power in Iraq.
But the US intelligence agencies knew all this. So why are they making a big deal about MP Muhammad now?
I do not know. But I entertain deep, dark suspicions that this leak is a means for the US to put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. He is surely vulnerable to this sort of blackmail himself, since no Da'wa activist in Damascus in the 1980s can have been completely innocent of the organization's then darker side. I suspect the message to al-Maliki is, back off from the Mahdi Army and back off from Iran, or we can arrange to put you in the same docket as MP Muhammad.
As for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, another main component of the ruling bloc in Iraq, it was a Khomeinist organization in the 1980s and 1990s that ran a guerrilla paramilitary, the Badr Corps. I don't know that it ever hit a specifically American target. But it wasn't exactly a US ally. To say the least.
If you start worrying about the Shiite government of Iraq having people in it who were anti-American in the 1980s, you'd have to arrest the lot of them. This is self-evident to US intelligence agencies. Therefore, making a big deal out of Muhammad is likely a way of telegraphing a threat."
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