I also found an analysis from last fall on antiwar.com that describes Sadr as one of Iran’s “Iraqi Shi’ite political-military allies” (link: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=9724). (Incidentally, this article also supports your position that Sadr is the main power in Iraq today.)

On the other hand, an older analysis on tompaine.com, written by an editor for The Nation, says “Sadr’s relationship with Iran is unclear,” with both evidence for and against the connection—mostly against. (link: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/09/22/badr_vs_sadr.php) (This article, by the way, also forthrightly describes Sadr as having “launched” two battles against American forces.)

And of course there are a raft of right-of-center sources that describe Sadr as Iran’s proxy, but I assumed you would dismiss these with a wave of your mouse (quite legitimately, in may cases).

Who’s right, if anybody? I certainly don’t know, but it seems safe to say that this issue (and every other one I mentioned) is quite disputed, and not just by the White House. Interestingly, though, the one position not represented in my unscientific sample is that Sadr is “the most anti-Iranian of the major Shiites leaders,” which, as you assert, is the position of those who know anything. Even a quick perusal of Juan Cole’s site did not turn up support for this idea, though Cole does say that “of all the major Shiite fo®ces, the Sadrists are the least close to Iran” (not quite the same thing). (Link: http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/muqtada-pledges-defense-of-iran-from.html)

John Q, I am not trying to trot out a battery of selectively culled web quotes to support one specific position, in the manner of your garden-variety comment troll. In fact I am trying to do the opposite; very little in this conflict can be “proved” one way or the other. I find your smug assertion of a single (and facile) interpretation of events to be galling. (Though to be fair, there’s not as much hard evidence against your interpretation as there is against Glenn Reynolds’. So your original criticism is apt.)

Feel free to point out an occasion on which the Administration has been proved right on Iraq on any disputed point (suggestions: WMDs, AQ links, “mission accomplished”, dead-enders, Allawi, Chalabhi, “good news from Iraq” in general). Then of course, there’s the point on which this thread began.

To answer your last question, even if you think war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was justified, how can you justify a war against a political movement like Sadr’s, which had no particular quarrel with the US until they turned up in Iraq.

Sadr, meanwhile, launched two mini-wars agains Coalition forces, intended (I suspect) to result in Sadr as some sort of Iraqi ayatollah. Both were swatted down. So he turned to politics, where he’s been more successful. He’s routinely described as Maliki’s most important source of support, ergo untouchable. Ideally the leader of a political bloc would not have a private army, but as you say he may be no more nefarious than any other militia leader—if more powerful, and therefore more danderous. But now, if he’s really fled the country, the political tide may have also turned.

I don’t know the real answer of course. Maybe he’ll be back, stronger than before. But it does seem like the years-long effort to sideline a potentially very dangerous piece of the Iraqi puzzle may be getting somewhere.

Incidentally, what about the US’s dealings with Sadr represents a war crime? Unless you consider the whole affair a war crime, as many clearly do.

Crime rates did rise during that period. It was a function of two contemporaneous statistical factors. First, the UCR, (Uniform Crime Reports) are voluntary and during that period more police agencies collected and reported their stats. But secondly and more importantly, the baby boomers came of age. Take a guess which age demographic is most likely to commit crimes. 14 to 45 is the prime crime committing demographic. After that, even hard core offenders tend to taper off. If you want to be picky about it, adjusting for these two statistical blips, crime rates have pretty much remained constant over time. Getting “tough on rampant crime” is just a political scam. They figured out long before 9/11 that fear is an excellent political tool and motivator.

Apparently the people who repeatedly book him on TV and radio shows, in which he is referred to as one of the US’s most important political bloggers, give a shit.

Reynolds may not be “serious,” but the “ignore them and they’ll go away” strategy just isn’t going to cut it here.

Of course, now he is, if anything, a force for stability, using the “surge” to rid himself of some of his more out-of-control subordinates, while he waits for inevitable withdrawal.

#24 I don’t know who, but there are enough of them to make him #20 on the Technorati list.

My usual disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an expert on Iraq, only a newspaper reader. But many who do claim to be experts have wildly divergent opinions on this, generally correlated with whether the opinion-holder wishes the Iraq enterprise to go well or go poorly.

Glenn Reynolds resembles those people in that he’s been talking about declining Bani Sadr for five or so years ago.

It may be that there are less of them now than ten years ago, and they don’t control the major media, but my guess is that Op-Ed writers fall into the category I described now and then.