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John Podhoretz writes:
The fact is that the news from the battlefield in Iraq these past five or six days has been remarkably good. The forces commanded and directed by the thug-cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are on the run or nearly destroyed in three different cities.
Sadr’s uprising two months ago was the moment at which even passionate supporters of the war and proponents of the success in achieving civil order began to grow terrified that somehow the United States might actually lose in Iraq. So shouldn’t the fact that we’re routing him be grounds for some optimism?
It’s very meaningful that other Shiite clerics in the city of Najaf now feel safe enough to issue what must be judged an astounding denunciation of Sadr in the past few days.
As reported on the brilliant Healing Iraq blog (healingiraq.blogspot.com), Najaf clerics laid the blame for the entry of U.S. forces into that holy city: “It is the movement of Sayyid Muqtada [Sadr] that has encouraged the occupiers to cross the red lines,” the senior clerics in Najaf wrote. “And it is clear that the organization of Sayyid Muqtada – and whoever follows the Sadrist movement – were the first to violate the sanctity of” the city’s holiest shrine.
The Najaf clerics were not only slamming Al Sadr, but were also publicly disagreeing with a statement of Lebanese Hezbollah. From the same Healing Iraq article Podhoretz references:
The Marji’iyah (senior Shia clerics) of the Najaf Hawza gave a joint response to what Hassan Nasrallah, the General Secretary of Lebanese Hezbollah, had said in his Friday sermon with regard to the situation in Najaf and Karbala…
1. It is the movement of Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr that is losing legitimacy in the strictest sense…
4. The organization of Sayyid Muqtada is now carrying out intimidation of the general public and arrests of citizens…
5. The firing of shots at the great dome of the shrine of Imam Ali (peace be upon him) [in Najaf], according to some specialists was most likely from the weapons of Sayyid Muqtada’s followers and not from the weapons of others., inasmuch as the time of shooting was the day fighting flared up in the Valley of Peace cemetery, and there wasn’t any fighting from the side of Alnabi street, whereas you claimed in your important sermon that the direction of the shooting was from the side of the Qibla gate [to the shrine], which is the side of Alnabi street.
6. The strike on the home and office of his Excellence Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani happened within the security perimeter whose every span was controlled by the organization of Sayyid Muqtada, and the office of Marji’ Ali [Sistani] was in the immediate proximity to the center of the security perimeter of Sayyid Muqtada’s organization [office], well guarded, and especially so in the vicinity of both of their offices, and so how can it be conceived – and you being an expert in these matters – that this stringent security perimeter was breached by an unknown organization, which carried out a protracted strike on the home of the Sayyid Marji’ [Sistani] and then retreated without the cognizance of the organization of Sayyid Muqtada.
