Maybe it’s because it seems as though Moktada al-Sadr is going to win anyway, but I’m intrigued by Bartle Breese Bull’s op-ed in the New York Times, “An Enemy We Can Work With.”
Sadr is certainly not going to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, but we’re long since past that notion. In Sadr’s favor: he and his family were bitter enemies of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and his father was killed by Saddam; Sadr’s movement of the dispossessed has far fewer ties to Iran than does Iraq’s Shiite elite; and, at least according to Bull, Sadr has privately, though grudgingly, lent his tacit support to the American occupation.
There is not going to be a good outcome in Iraq. Bull points the way to a possible least-bad outcome that we could live with.
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whatever gets us out the soonest…personally, I don’t care who rules Iraq, if anyone, as long as it doesn’t result in more American deaths or compromised interests.