The voting shows that Mr Maliki and his Dawa party are stronger but the significance can be exaggerated. Although he fought a secular campaign, on important decisions Mr Maliki does not generally act without seeking the opinion of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The election has also been painted as a setback for Iranian influence but Mr Maliki is still going to keep close relations with Tehran while remaining on good terms with the US. One test of the success of the election will be how far the results are accepted by the losers.

Others might question Cockburn’s pessimism: from his base in Qom, Muqtada retains influence over a strong nationalist current in Iraq, and in August 2008, it was Sadrists who led protests against the ‘Status of Forces’ agreement between the us and the Maliki government, which was obliged to reject the treaty amid a wave of anti-Occupation sentiment. Muqtada continues to weave between the traditions of Iraqi nationalism and Shia communalism—ministering to his Shia working-class base while making sporadic appeals to Iraqi society as a whole. Whether he can help to forge a coherent political force that will reject any further accommodations with the occupiers remains to be seen. But Cockburn has given us a valuable portrait of an individual who is pivotal to the country’s future political arrangements—and more importantly, of the social forces that will sustain him as long as he continues to speak for them.

"All the politicians are trying to prove that they care more about Iraqis than they do about Americans -- otherwise they know the people and the voters will not support them," said Ala Maaki, a senior lawmaker with Iraqi's largest Sunni political party. "I think we could see al-Maliki and Moqtada Sadr trying to one-up the other today and see who can take the strongest stand against the Americans."

a new struggle is beginning in iraq:
‘The Shia are the majority in Iraq and the Sadrists are a majority of this majority,’ a former Shia minister told me. ‘They make up 30 to 40 per cent of the total Iraqi population.’ The population of Iraq is 27 million: on this ex-minister’s calculation, up to ten million of them support Muqtada.
(...) The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and the militias but between rich and poor.
(...) As the Iraqi army started to advance in Basra at the end of March it became clear that Maliki’s offensive was targeted solely against the Mehdi Army. It did not touch the other two main militias in Basra, the Badr Organisation and Fadhila, a Sadrist splinter group powerful in the oilfields. Iraqis were not persuaded by Maliki’s argument that his aim was to eliminate criminal gangs in Basra. Banditry is obviously rife: a businessman friend told me that, to move a container from Umm Qasr port near Basra to Arbil in northern Iraq, he had recently paid $500 in transport fees and $3000 in bribes. Given that government officials in Baghdad seldom do anything without a bribe, Maliki’s claim that he would end criminality in Basra was never going to be convincing.
(...) By this time, American generals and politicians were saying that they had known nothing about Maliki’s disastrous offensive until the last minute -- conveniently forgetting that the Americans had been urging Iraqi prime ministers to attack the Mehdi Army since 2004.

shiite power struggle:
it is the armed wing of the Islamic Supreme Council that is affiliated with the Shiite high authority Ali al-Sistani, and both hold unquestionable allegiance to Iran. The US also claims to fight Iran’s agents in Iraq (who are blamed for the development of most destructive types of guerrilla warfare tactics) and yet Iran plays an uncontested role in determining the overall policies of the ruling Shiite parties in Iraq - who are willing collaborators with the US military.
(...) Top official Gen. David Petraeus has already boasted about the troop surge leading to a reduction in sectarian fighting. Statistics, however, directly contradict such claims. Figures from the Associated Press show that the month of August registered the second highest civilian death toll in Iraq - 1,809 civilians - since the US invasion of March 2003. The sharp rise is largely attributed to the quadruple suicide bombings on August 14, near the Syrian border, which killed 520 people.
(...) With Badr Brigade claiming 70,000 strong militiaman and al-Mahdi counting over 50,000, both groups are overwhelmed with fear and mistrust; under these circumstances, the prospect of co-existence seems bleak.

achcar interviewed on developments in iraq and lebanon:That's what they tried to achieve through the "surge", chiefly through a lot of spin. But it very blatantly failed. The major goal was to create conditions through which they would change the political alignments in Iraq and set up a new alliance that would be close to the US and enable Washington to better manoeuvre in the country. Moqtada al-Sadr was a chief target of this whole operation and we can measure its failure by the way he is now back and very much prominent in the news, after having vanished for a while.
(...) The February 2006 Samarra attack [a devastating Sunni sectarian attack on the Shia mosque there] was a watershed in the Iraqi situation. That is when the image of al-Sadr turned from one of non-sectarian Arab-cum-Iraqi nationalist into one of leader of a Shiite sectarian militia. He is trying now to restore his previous image. He probably believes that the climate is right for a new attempt -- after over a year during which the Shiites let off sectarian steam very intensively in response to the sectarian attacks they had suffered.
(...) Well there are. Al-Sadr's new tone is generally welcomed by the nationalists –in contrast to the sectarians -- among Arab Sunnis. If you put aside the al-Qaida type of anti-US anti-Shiite fanatics, there are two types of forces among the Iraqi Arab Sunnis: on the one hand, those chiefly spurred on by sectarian and anti-Iranian views, which are close to the Saudis and willing to make deals with the US against the Shiites. And, on the other hand, those who consider the US as the main, most dangerous, enemy and who are therefore willing to make an alliance with anti-US Shiite forces -- provided (as the fear of Iran is common to all Sunnis) these are forces that they deem to be independent enough from Iran. That is the case of Moqtada al-Sadr. Although he has obvious links with Tehran, which backed him increasingly over the last few years, he retains a certain degree of political autonomy and is known to be fiercely independent. His followers don't shy away from making statements criticising Iran. For instance, criticising the recent meeting between Iranian and US representatives over the issue of Iraq as unacceptable meddling into Iraq's affairs -- as did various forces among the Sunnis.
(...) It can't be so simple. I have been describing what al-Sadr is trying to do. I didn't imply that he is going to succeed. He can certainly find a certain measure of success, but a major success allowing him to be the winner in this whole confrontation is quite difficult to predict at this point. He's facing quite difficult conditions. The Allawi operation is still going on. It is essentially an attempt at building a cross-sectarian political coalition using the lure of US support in order to topple the Maliki government and bring Allawi back to the helm as the "strong man" and saviour of Iraq. Although I wouldn't bet one penny on the success of this operation, you can't exclude it totally.
(...) What is certain though is that we will see crucial changes in the coming period. For the Bush administration, the ongoing "surge" is a double or quits operation. They are under intensive pressure in the US. Although we have seen how the Democrats have shied away from pressing forward the issue of a timetable for troop withdrawal -- the issue of Iraq is prominent in the presidential election and US public opinion has become much opposed to the continuation of the war.
(...) So I can't see any winning strategy or winning card for the US in Iraq. The question is not whether the US can achieve victory or not. The failure is already there and is fundamentally irreversible. The problem is how much further harm they can do to Iraq by trying to implement crazy schemes that are doomed from the start.
[lebanon]
(...) There are two kinds of "conspiracy theory" on this issue in Lebanon: on the one hand, the pro-US or "governmental majority" forces claim that "Fatah al-Islam" are manipulated by the Syrian services. They claim that the recent clashes were provoked in order to counter the international tribunal on the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri that Washington, Paris and London had just moved through the UN Security Council. On the other hand, you have those, many of whom refer to the article by Hersh, who claim that "Fatah al-Islam" has been manipulated by the governmental majority itself, and behind them the Saudis and the United States.
(...) It is known, for instance, that the key leader of "Fatah al-Islam" had been jailed in Syria previously -- so there is no solid ground to suspect that the Syrian regime stands behind his group, except for the fact that the situation flared up just after the UNSC voted on the international tribunal.
(...) It is true as well that this brand of Sunni fanatical fundamentalism is usually linked to Saudi sources, whether official or unofficial. It might well be that, at some point, the Hariri bloc had a relationship with such a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, which adheres to an anti-Shiite sectarian tradition (and has eventually joined al-Qaida), with a view to a possible all-out confrontation with the Lebanese Shiites mainly represented by Hezbollah. But from that to infer that they are manipulating this group is also quite baseless.
(...) think that whatever ignited the confrontation, one thing is obvious: it has been immediately exploited for a very definite agenda. This was (1) to test the ability of the Lebanese army to confront other forces, starting with the easiest -- Palestinians, against whom Lebanese Shiite and Sunni soldiers alike can be united with no major risk of split along sectarian lines; and (2) to get the army to enter this Palestinian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon and take control of it under the pretext of fighting this group.
(...) This is why at some point Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, came out saying that he considered the penetration by the Lebanese army of the camp to be a "red line." Why did he say so, despite Hezbollah initially expressing its solidarity with the Lebanese army? Because he realised that this Palestinian camp has become a testing ground for the ability of the Lebanese army to implement a task that is part of UNSC Resolution 1559 (sponsored by Washington, London and Paris in 2004) calling for the disarming of both the Palestinian camps and Hezbollah. Nasrallah became aware that the battle of Nahr el-Bared is but a first step on a path that leads ultimately to the fight against his own forces. You can see that in the broad display of active solidarity with the Lebanese army in the ongoing confrontation: Washington is sending weapons and inciting all its allies to send whatever hardware the Lebanese army needs.
(...) The [general] situation is at a real dead end, which means that it is tense and dangerous. For months now, the country has been on the verge of a sectarian explosion, which could ignite new bloody fighting or even a new civil war.
(...) Hezbollah's strategy got bogged down completely. This is a result of the limitation inherent in their sectarian view of things, in their conception of power sharing among sectarian communities and existing power blocs. Through a series of clumsy positions, in which their alliance with the Syrian dictatorship played no minor role, they comforted the present sectarian division in this country between Shiites and Sunnis.
(...) Although at some point, it appeared at the beginning of the Israeli offensive last summer that there was a reduction in sectarianism, it soon came back very strongly. Hezbollah's sectarian nature made it easy for the Hariri camp to exploit Sunni sectarian feelings in very blatant ways. So the whole situation has got bogged down and the opposition has lost the political initiative that they had when they started their mobilisation at the beginning of last winter.
(...) The Shiite Hezbollah and Amal, the Maronite General Aoun and many other smaller forces. In sectarian terms, that means the overwhelming majority of the Shiites plus a sizeable fraction of the Christians in alliance against the majority of the Sunnis, plus the majority of the Druze and another fraction of the Christians. This is the configuration of forces in Lebanon as it stands now -- as sectarian as it used to be at the peak of the civil war.

sadr, sectarianism, withdrawal:
An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr.
(...) Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda.
(...) The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilize crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.
(...) a Navy Seal special operations officer recently returned from eight months in Anbar province, who discussed the situation there with high-ranking Pentagon officials at the end of April, suggests that that the views of Sunni leaders are quite compatible with those of Sadr. A source familiar with the officer's account said the Sunni Sheiks in Anbar have been telling U.S. commanders that the United States must withdraw its troops, and that the Sunnis know how to handle both al Qaeda and the Shiites.
(...) Sadr's project for a Sunni-Shiite united front against both al Qaeda and U.S. occupation offers a potential basis for an eventual settlement of the sectarian civil war in Iraq as well as for U.S. withdrawal. But it could also be the basis for a new and more deadly phase of fighting if Sadr returns once more to military resistance.

al-sadr back in the public eye:
Al-Sadr said: "I say to our Sunni brothers in Iraq that we are brothers and the occupier shall not divide us. They are welcome and we are ready to co-operate with them in all fields. This is my hand I stretch out to them." Al-Sadr's call came a few days after Shia leaders from his east Baghdad stronghold met with Sunni tribal heads from western Iraq. Both sides promised to work together for national reconciliation and against extremism.
He said: "I received complaints from brother Sunnis and some Christians about the aggressions of the Nawasib. I am ready to defend them and will be a shield for them, although the occupier would not accept that." "I say that our houses and cities are open for them and that for Iraqis to kill Sunnis and Christians is a sin. What the Nawasib are doing to compel the Christians to embrace Islam is despicable."

patrick cockburn on sadr assasination attempt:
The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official.
(...) It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with little thought for the consequences include the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the Baath party.
(...) The attempted assassination or abduction took place two-and-a-half years ago in August 2004 when Mr Sadr and his Mehdi Army militiamen were besieged by US Marines in Najaf, south of Baghdad.
(...) Mr Sadr emerged as the leader of the Sadrist movement in Baghdad at the time of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It had been founded by his father, also a cleric, who had confronted Saddam's regime in the 1990s and had been murdered by his agents in 1999. Its blend of nationalism, religion and populism proved highly attractive to Iraqi Shia, particularly to the very poor.
(...) The US always felt deeply threatened by Mr Sadr because, unlike the other Shia parties, he opposed the occupation and demanded that it end. There were two attempts to crush his movement in 2004, neither of which was successful. The first, at the end of March, began with the closure of his newspaper and the arrest of one of his close advisers. A warrant for Mr Sadr's own arrest was issued. A US general said his only alternatives were to be killed or captured. The US authorities appeared to have little understanding of the reverence with which the Sadr family was regarded by many Iraqi Shia.
(...) Muqtada al-Sadr is one of the most extraordinary figures to emerge during the war in Iraq, a pivotal figure leading a broad-based political movement with a powerful military wing. The appeal of the 33-year-old Shia cleric is both religious and nationalist. He is regarded with devotion by millions. He is also a survivor and an astute politician who has often out-manoeuvred his opponents. The US and Britain have repeatedly underestimated the strength of his support.
(...) His movement became less confrontational. It took part in the elections in 2005, winning 32 seats out of 275. The Mehdi Army was viewed by the Sunni as an organisation of sectarian death squads. The US began increasingly to confront the Sadrists. But they were an essential support of the Iraqi government, making it difficult for the US to move against them. When the reinforced US forces in Baghdad did threaten the Mehdi Army, Muqtada simply sent his militiamen home, and disappeared from view.

withdrawal:
Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the "free deputies," signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.

dividing walls:
The latest wall to divide city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in April, built by American soldiers using 12-foot (3.7-metre) high grey concrete slabs weighing more than six metric tons each. The 3-mile-long construction separates a Sunni Muslim district from a Shi’ite area. It provoked protests from both communities and Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr termed it “racist.”
(...) Many of the ruses used when the Iron Curtain was still up — hollowed out hiding spaces in cars, tunnels, hook ladders — are still used now. Then, successful crossers were hailed as heroes of freedom. Now they are seen as a threat or a burden.
(...) That applies to one of the least known but longest border barriers of modern times, built by Morocco in the 1980s to curb attacks by the Western Sahara independent movement, Polisario, on territory it claims for itself. It lies behind a set of walls some 1,700 miles long and 10 feet high made of earth, rock and sand built in the 1980s. The wall is defended by thousands of Moroccan troops and fortified by bunkers and fences, barbed wire and landmines — between 200,000 and several million of them, depending on who does the estimating.
(...) Saudi Arabia has quietly invited bids for a 550-mile high-tech fence — complete with sensors, night vision cameras, face-recognition software, barbed wire — to seal off its border with Iraq.
(...) Almost invariably, governments that decide on physical separation from a neighbor predict that it would reduce tension but, at times, that remains wishful thinking. In April, for example, a firefight broke out between Afghan and Pakistani troops after the Afghans tried to tear down parts of a fence running through a tribal area. Pakistan started building a fence along part of the 1,500-mile (2,500-kilometer) border under U.S. pressure to close the routes of Taliban fighters heading to Afghanistan to join the war against U.S. and multinational forces.
(...) But Spain has built double fences 10 to 20 feet high and topped with razor wire around its wealthy enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco to keep immigrants out.
(...) The fences have had an effect similar to the walls on the border between the United States and Mexico: would-be immigrants from poor countries looked for other ways to reach a rich country. Stepped-up Spanish coastal patrols and better radar systems prompted African migrants to make riskier voyages to the Spanish-owned Canary Islands. Hundreds have drowned.
(...) If history is a guide, no border fortification can seal off a country entirely. Even the mother of all walls, the Great Wall of China, at around 4,000 miles the longest border wall ever built, failed to keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was meant to protect.

al-sadr and the occupation (cockburn):
Menacingly for the US, Mr Sadr called on Iraqi police and soldiers, many of them his supporters, to oppose the occupation. His new anti-American campaign is in keeping with Iraqi opinion going by a recent poll by ABC, the BBC, ARD and USA Today. It showed that 78 per cent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces in Iraq. More than 7 out of 10 Shia--and almost all Sunni--say the US military presence makes security worse.
(...)A significant change in Iraqi politics over the past four years has been the growing hostility of the Shia towards the US. Although the government of Mr Maliki is in effect a Shia-Kurdish coalition, 59 per cent of Iraqis think the US controls things in Iraq according to the poll. Many Shia see the US as covertly manipulating the real levers of power in order to exclude them. For instance the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, the main security service, under General Mohammed Shahwani, is wholly funded by the CIA at a reported cost of $3 bn since 2004.

report from iraq (cockburn):
The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.
(...) The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority. Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.
(...) The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.

talking to the resistance:
(...) I think the thing we found was they were socially diverse, some had served in the military, some had not. There were some Sunni and some Shi'a, like the Traveler and the Syrian. What surprised us was in some ways how understandable, normal it was once you heard them explain what they were fighting for, their motivations. It started to make more sense. We didn't know what we would find, but that was a little bit surprising. They said "we are defending our land, we don't want to be occupied. Our honor is attacked by foreign troops on the soil." Generally their feeling wasn't anti-American hatred, or hatred of America "because of our freedom." It was because soldiers were on the ground. It wouldn't have mattered if those troops were French or Chinese or American.
(...) He said we want to have a good relationship with America, but send us your engineers or scholars, not your warriors who shoot the place up.
(...) This is the first insurgency in history where you can't cut the head off because there is no head. Leadership is going where your followers want you to go. That was a really valuable lesson for us. [first in history? strongly doubt that]
(...) The major difference between Sunni and Shi'a in this context is that the Sunni are going to make their individual decision. They have a more "Protestant" direct relationship with God, they will make their own decision about Jihad. Shia have a more "Catholic" perspective, they will follow the rules and fatwas laid down by their leaders. Some follow Sistani, some follow Sadr, and there are other leaders. If you look at the control the Shi'a leaders have over the population, it's almost like a tap. Sadr can turn the tap on, say "I want you out demonstrating, or he can say "I want everyone to stay home, so there's this really direct control the Shi'a leadership has that doesn't exist on the Sunni side.
(...) In pulling his cabinet members this week, Sadr says he wants those positions filled by technocrats, to diminish the sectarian elements in the government.
(...) I don't know if you spotted this, but there is a sort of "re-nationalism" coming up, after that bomb attack in the Green Zone the other day, which was purported to be by a suicide bomber. There's talk of a shadow government being formed, a non-sectarian political bloc of Sadrists and Sunni nationalists. So this is spinning out into a very interesting way.
(...) . We've found that there's a sense of relief there, that "Hey, I'm not going crazy, it's not about two-headed monsters, this is bout normal human beings and normal motivations. Once you understand this first year of the resistance, a lot of other things fall in to place.

on al-sadr, sistani, and opposition to the occupation (hiro):
This indeed was the case with the demonstration on April 9 in Najaf. (...) The size of the demonstration and its composition were unprecedented. "There are people here from all different parties and sects," Hadhim al-Araji, Sadr's representative in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, told reporters. "We are all carrying the national flag, a symbol of unity. And we are all united in calling for the withdrawal of the Americans."
(...) Crucially, the mammoth demonstration reflected the view prevalent among Iraqi lawmakers. Last autumn, 170 of them in a 275-member parliament, signed a motion, demanding to know the date of a future American withdrawal. The discomfited government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki played a procedural trick by referring the subject to a parliamentary committee, thereby buying time.
(...) Opinion polls conducted since then show three-quarters of Iraqi respondents demanding the withdrawal of the Anglo-American troops within six to 12 months.
(...) [on al-Sadr] Moqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and two elder brothers were assassinated outside a mosque in Najaf in February 1999 by the henchmen of President Saddam Hussein. The grand ayatollah had defied Saddam by issuing a religious decree calling on Shi'ites to attend Friday prayers in mosques. The Iraqi dictator, paranoid about large Shi'ite gatherings, feared these would suddenly turn violently anti-regime.
(...) [free speech?] When Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq, banned his magazine Al-Hawza al-Natiqa ("The Vocal Seminary") in April 2004 and American soldiers fired on his followers protesting peacefully against the publication's closure, Sadr called for "armed resistance" to the occupiers....Bremer let the ban on the magazine lapse and dropped his plan to arrest Sadr.
(...) [avoiding the surge] hen the Pentagon mounted its latest security plan for Baghdad on Feb. 13 – aiming to crush both the Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias – Sadr considered discretion the better part of valor. He ordered his Mahdi militiamen to get off the streets and hide their weapons. For the moment, they were not to resist American forays into Shi'ite neighborhoods. He then went incommunicado. Moqtada's decision to avoid bloodshed won plaudits not only from Iraqi politicians but also, discreetly, from Sistani, who decries violence, and whose commitment to bringing about the end of the foreign occupation of Iraq is as strong as Sadr's – albeit not as vocal.
(...) [najaf 2004] It was the Mahdi Army – controlling the shrine of Imam Ali, the founder of Shi'ite Islam, in the holy city of Najaf – that battled the American troops to a standstill in August 2004.
(...) [on sistani] Ali Sistani established his nationalist credentials early on. As the invading American forces neared Najaf on March 25, 2003, he issued a religious decree requiring all Muslims to resist the invading "infidel" troops. Once the Anglo-American forces occupied Iraq, he adamantly refused to meet American or British officials or their emissaries, and continues to do so to this day.
(...) [the constitution, january 2005] When Allawi began dithering about holding the vote for an interim parliament by January 2005, as stipulated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546, Sistani warned that he would call for popular non-cooperation with the occupying powers if it was not held on time. In the elections that followed, the United Iraqi Alliance – the brainchild of Sistani – emerged as the majority group and thus the leading designer of the new constitution. Respecting Sistani's views, the Iraqi constitution stipulated that Sharia (Islamic law) was to be the principal source of Iraqi legislation and that no law would be passed that violated the undisputed tenets of Islam.
(...) [hiro´s argument, then:] In sum, while refraining from participating in everyday politics, Sistani intervenes on the issues of paramount importance to the Iraqi people, as he sees them. Western journalists, who routinely describe him as belonging to the "quietist school" of Shi'ite Islam (at odds with the "interventionist school"), are therefore off the mark. Given Sistani's uncompromising opposition to the presence of foreign troops in Iraq, his staunch nationalism, and the unmatched reverence that he evokes, particularly among the majority Shi'ites, he poses a greater long-term threat to Washington's interests in Iraq than Moqtada al-Sadr; and, far from belonging to opposite schools of Shi'ite Islam, Sadr and Sistani, both staunch nationalists, complement each other – much to the puzzled frustration of the Bush White House.
(...) [on including the sunnis?] What must worry Washington more than the massive size of the demonstration on April 9 was its mixed Shi'ite-Sunni composition and nationalistic ambiance. The prospect of Sadr's appeal extending to a section of the Sunni community, with the tacit support of Sistani, is the nightmare scenario that the Bush administration most dreads. Yet it may come to pass.

sadr bloc pulling out of iraqi gov't (al-jazeera):
"We are going to declare our withdrawal from government because the prime minister does not want to make a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq," one official said.
(...) The move is unlikely to bring down the government, but it could create tensions in the fractious Shia-led coalition. The al-Sadr movement's 30 MPs will continue to attend parliament.

iraqi government defends occupation, iraqi government breaks up:
Abdul-Mehdi al-Muteyri said Sadr's movement, which has six ministers in cabinet including those for health and agriculture, would not remain in a government which he said constantly defended the U.S. occupation. "Our withdrawal from the government is now inevitable and might take place in a matter of days," he said.

on where the surge didn't go, and what iraqis understand:
The eruption of demonstrations in the south of Iraq this week could rob the occupation forces of what was considered a critical bastion of support.
(...) "We have been patient and we have sacrificed a lot thinking the situation would be better one day soon," Hussein Ali, a teacher from Diwaniyah told IPS. "The result we see now is that we were dragged into a swamp of hatred between brothers, and that all the bloodshed was for the sake of war leaders to get more power and fortune."
(...) "Four years of patience and what do we get?" Ali Hashim, a merchant from the southern city Basra told IPS. "We got nothing but the loss of our country to those who spoke a lot but did nothing. The United States failed us and sold us cheap to those who would have no mercy on us."
(...) "We were late to realise that we were wrong about U.S.intentions," Salman Yassen of the Basra city municipality council told IPS. "We waited four years while U.S. and Iraqi authorities kept us busy fighting each other while they were setting the plan of stealing our oil and tearing our country apart so that their allies would feel safe."

on the rhetoric, and the resistance (p. cockburn):
Some 92 per cent of Iraq's five million strong Sunni community say they support armed resistance against the US.
(...) Although President Bush has been seeking to blame Iran for supporting the insurgency in Iraq there is little evidence for that. The great majority of attacks on US forces are by Sunni guerrillas in Sunni districts. There have been battles with Shia militia but these have been intermittent. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army, the largest Shia militia, has stood down his men and told them to avoid a confrontation with US forces.