May 22, 2007
Sadr the Savior?
Well, it would appear that the answer to all our prayers in Iraq is none other than the man endlessly demonized as a terrorist by el Presidente, Moqtada al Sadr.
How did this happen? How did a radical Islamic cleric become an honest broker in Iraq? As it turns out, it's not America's fault. It was the dipshit neocons who got us into this retarded thing. From Harpers (via Feet To Fire)
When I arrived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary Mahdi Army. It struck me that if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be one of them. That's who al Sadr's foot soldiers are: the young men who have been shut out of the neocons' grand plans for Iraq, who see no possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the promised reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic where the streetlights don't work. And yes, they organize militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer's economic casualties, dressed them in black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the mosques and the state factories when the occupation authorities did not, but in some areas they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic law by torching liquor stores and terrorizing women without the veil. Indeed, the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer's shock therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers.
While Bremmer and the American administrators (in some cases, kids barely out of college whose only previous employment was driving an ice cream truck) used their Friedman-based neocon gameplan, al Sadr was winning hearts and minds by doing the very things Bush's folks should have been doing... providing basic services to the people of Iraq.
And now they want a second chance? Fuck a bunch of that.
Posted by mcblogger at May 22, 2007 03:44 PM
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