I agree 100%. And what;s interesting is that with all the talk of civil war, no one is talking much about the rivalry between Sadr and Sistani as actually acting as a break on such an eventuality.

Sadr can’t afford a war with Sistan’s more numerous and more powerful Badr Brigades. Sistani can’t afford to lose a player who commands the support that Sadr does (nor does Sistani want to drive the US away as any Shia government is going to need our continued assistance both military and economic).

As much as they loathe each other, they need each other. The same might be said of the Sunnis.

On such a basis, nations are built.

The key question is the insurgency. Having won this round, it would be wise for the Shiites to throw Sunni leaders some sort of political bone before October’s ratifications. With three provinces of Sunni majority, the Sunnis are in a position …

Today, Sadr is fighting for a place at the Shia table, as well as the national one. Sistani, still the major player in Shia, and perhaps a Kingmaker, works to marginalize Sadr for personal and political reasons.

It’s an interesting question whether Sadr will break from the Shia orthodoxy and re-contact his Baathist connections. While operationally it would work for both of them, the Sunnis could undercut the US and the Shiites, Sadr could gsain allies against Sistani, it is not in Sadr’s long term interest. His position can only be to the religious right of Sadr’s he can’s support a constitutional arrangement that would help the Sunnis.

We’ll have to see.

There really was little choice. In Najaf, we had his forces surrounded. As you may recall, he was holed up in one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam when Sistani brokered the deal that let him off the hook. In order to kill him then, we would have had to take out the Shrine - and incur the wrath of 100 million Shias.

In Sadr city, if we had wanted to destroy his militia, we would have had to take a bunch of civilians with him. Again, domestic political concerns (like those that prevented an earlier Fallujah campaign) came into play.

I’m not sure how smart he is. He’s not widely traveled nor is he a respected cleric (as I mention in the article). I think you may be ascribing too much in the way of brains to this guy.

I think…

I am not so sure that he was foolish, forced to agree to a settlement or was setback in any way.

I suspect that he knew exactly what he was up against and knew how to be victorious. There are more ways to win than killing all of the enemy and my opinion is that a political victory is what he was looking for, and got. He did, after all, walk away with a cease fire not once but twice and he is now so deeply invoved in the equation that he can disrupted the entire constitutional process. His victory comes in the form of being that “sharp end of the stick for his brand of Iraqi nation building.”

I would like to think that our military and political professionals thought through the consequences of allowing Al Sadr breathe air rather than dirt and that they knew what they were doing (although I fear that we have forgotten how to fight a war). I still recall EVERYONE asking why we let him walk, not once but TWICE! So much for massive military power.

But since it is fun to throw out opinions, I’ll throw this out: it was he who was victorious, not us. We should have taken him out with a show of force that no one could have mistaken while we had the chance. I am not sure what all of the consequences of killing him might have been but maybe we would have been rid of him and his sharp stick.

I don’t know what the consequences