This one's by Lee Harris, in an article on TCS Daily entitled "Misunderestimating Moktada al-Sadr". A friend of mine recently suggested that the political situation in Iraq is an experiment. The result of the experiment remains to be seen. If Mr. Harris is correct, the result may not be quite what most of us expected when we enthusiastically supported this war. The article is well worth reading. Here's an excerpt:
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, often said that Hitler's rise to power was like a fairy tale. Al-Sadr's rise to power, on the other hand, seems suspiciously like a fable from A Thousand and One Nights. What Hitler did was merely improbable; what al-Sadr has done verges on the seemingly impossible. After having twice led bloody uprisings that killed American troops, Sadr is now the most powerful man in an Iraqi government that the American people have created at great sacrifice to themselves, both in lives and in money. Even more bizarrely, Sadr has made it clear that he will use every bit of power he gets in order to fight against us, and to help spread fanatical anti-Americanism through the Muslim world. We could have stopped him early and effectively; but we didn't. And now it is too late for us to do anything except to wonder what new surprise this twisted tale of Scheherazade will next unfold.
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