Tuesday 20 June 2006

Remember Muqtada al-Sadr?

Zarqawi is gone, and even I am glad for that. But in terms of influence, Muqtada al-Sadr may be scarier. Unfortunately, his death, I fear would backfire. Read the transcript [scroll down to In Depth: Dispatch From Iraq] of Fareed Zakaria's interview with Nir Rosen which aired two weeks ago on Foreign Exchange. It still chills me. In whose hands are we placing lethal power?

1 comment:

-epm said...

Good point. The violence in Iraq is, of course, multi-dimensional. Zarqawi represented the "foreign" face... the self proclaimed al Qaeda faction. But others represent the true, internal insurgency, al-Sadr among them.

To me, what makes al-Sadr so dangerous is that he's tacitly bought into the political process... but only as a means toward advancing his fundamentalist Islamist power base. He is not an easilly hated, foreign fringe element (like "al Qaeda in Iraq," which is more dispised by the local population every month).