Waiting For Victory

As we cringe at the thought of the VSP reviewing the the latest performance by Petraeus and Crocker in the Hedgemony’s Washington production of Waiting for Victory perhaps we should review the scenic design of the stage.

Dr. Cole provides information on the current scene and what he thinks it might mean.

Sudarsan Raghavan in the Washington Post covers the background of the plot to this point in his piece, Rift widens between Iraq’s Shiites.

This is expanded on by Reuters in their piece, Iraq’s Sadr to disband Mehdi Army if clerics order

Senior Sadr aide Hassan Zargani said Sadr would seek rulings from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shi’ite cleric, and senior Shi’ite clergy based in Iran, on whether to dissolve the Mehdi Army, and would obey their orders.

“If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders,” Zargani told Reuters from neighboring Iran, where U.S. officials say Sadr has spent most of the past year.

However, Sadr’s spokesman in the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf, Salah al-Ubaidi, said the idea of disbanding the militia was not new and there was no plan to seek a ruling from top clerics.

“Sadr is willing to dissolve the Mehdi Army if the higher religious authorities order him to do so. (But) this is an old idea and didn’t come in response to Maliki’s orders,” he said.

For those who slept through the first few acts, al Sadr has said for years that he will ask the Mahdi Army to disband if the Shi’ia ayatollahs rule that he should. It isn’t going to happen, but as a Shi’ia grad student it never hurts to suck up to the professors by telling them how much he respects and honors their views. As long as the US is in Iraq, there will be a Mahdi Army.

Moqtada al Sadr needs to complete grad school to have the standing to issue decisions, not just opinions. If the leading ayatollahs issued a decision that the Mahdi Army should disband, he would have to do their bidding or leave the graduate program. He can’t truly lead the Sadrist movement without a degree, so this isn’t a concession, it is a statement of his reality.