Dancing with Sadr

In a total reversal of policy U.S. Diplomats and military officials are conducting secret talks with the armed militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr. They have grudgingly accepted a harsh reality - that the radical cleric holds the trump card in much of Iraq’s future.

The United States fears that not reaching out for a compromise will deter any accomplishments they have reached. It is also a bad taste to swallow - a harsh about-face from back in 2004 when the U.S. branded Sadr an outlaw and demanded his arrest, which in turn ignited two drastically major Shiite revolts in Baghdad and the Southern Shrine city of Najaf that resulted in more than one-thousand deaths.

Obviously we are speaking about a marriage of convenience here, similarly to ones that had been formed in other parts of Iraq with other insurgent groups, many of which were Saddam Hussein loyalists.
"You’re not going to kill or capture all of the Sadr militia anymore than we are going to kill or capture all the insurgents in Iraq." General Petraeus has said.

The White House is eager for a breakthrough. In part because of the discontent here in America. They feel, in part, though distasteful, perhaps the only viable option to succeeding and ending our involvement in Iraq is to cozy up with Sadr.

There are even some who speculate that the cards have been dealt and that Sadr holds the winning hand. The aftertaste to the American officials is indeed a hard pill to swallow. But Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. And initially the Americans believed they could contain this chaos. But that was a total miscalculation of the fighting spirit of all the parties involved. We are now waist deep in something we do not need to be involved with. So we need a way out. So as the progression of this civil war advances into uglier stages our blood which already fills the streets of Baghdad and other areas of Iraq will only continue as long as our presence exists there. Iraq is destined to be divided, with Sadr controlling Baghdad and much of the areas surrounding it. And there just isn’t a thing we can do about it.

It all has the makings of the birth of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. We always dance with whomever serves us for the moment, even while knowing they will be our enemy very soon thereafter.

Amazingly, what we have already witnessed in Sadr, is that he outwardly, and far from shyly, is so much more anti-American than Hussein initially appeared. Have we accepted someone far worse? We know he will not be good for Iraq, but how certain are we that he will not come back and bite us in a more scarily manner than Saddam ever did? We will be forever looking over our shoulders. The Bush Administration tells us that the world is not the same! But have they not assisted in making this eerily true?
AGORAVOX