[World Affairs Journal] You remember Moqtada al Sadr. He’s the guy who mounted an Iranian-backed Shia insurgency against the United States, the Iraqi government and his Sunni civilian neighbors between 2003 and 2008. He’s a very different person today. He still raises and shakes his fist in the air but today he’s shaking it at crooked elites, and he’s shaking it at his former Iranian patrons.
“If corrupt (officials) and quotas remain,” Sadr declared, “the entire government will be brought down and no one will be exempt.” In other words, drain the swamp.
He’s Iraq’s version of the rabble-rousing populist: fundamentalist, anti-establishment and anti-foreigner. A champion of the working class and a declared enemy of liberal Western ideas. His list even included Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the colorful journalist who famously threw a shoe at President George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad in 2008.
He would of course be nowhere without the Westerners he despises. Americans, after all, cleared Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian Baath Party regime out of the way and established the election system that put him on top. He’d also be nowhere without Iran. His former allies in the Islamic Republic next door armed his Mahdi Army militia and gave him refuge when the Americans were coming to get him.
Now that the United States is (mostly) gone from Iraq, and now that Iran has been mucking around in Iraqi politics to disastrous effect for more than a decade, Sadr has become as anti-Iranian as he is anti-American. He’s not at all happy with a foreign capital using his government as a hand-puppet, whether that foreign capital is Washington, DC, or Tehran.
Sadr is painfully reactionary and more than a little bit dangerous. He’s also complicated. He is a Shia sectarian whose militia brutally “cleansed” Sunnis from neighborhoods in and around Baghdad but he’s also what passes today for an Iraqi nationalist, disavowing violence against all Iraqis and opposing all foreign influence. “We won’t allow the Iraqis to be cannon fodder for the wars of others nor be used in proxy wars outside Iraq,” says Sadrist movement member Jumah Bahadily of the Syrian civil war.
He also forged an alliance with communists—a horrifying ideological cocktail from the point of view of any liberal-minded Westerner, but alas there are few Jeffersonian democrats in old Mesopotamia. There are however, some secular reformists and technocrats, and they also formed an alliance with the Sadrists. Tehran has taken notice and isn’t happy about it. “We will not allow liberals and communists to govern in Iraq,” says Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Iranian ruler Ayatollah Khamenei.
Posted by: newc ||
05/23/2018 00:00 ||
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He’s Iraq’s version of the rabble-rousing populist: fundamentalist, anti-establishment and anti-foreigner. A champion of the working class and a declared enemy of liberal Western ideas.
Another Fascist... Another Hitler. Instead of Jews he likes to kill Sunni, fights the "Far Satan' (i.e. Western) Menace instead of a crypto-Jewish Communist Menace, and so forth and so on.
[FoxNews] Other than tax reform and judicial confirmations, the Senate has accomplished very little this year, and restless conservatives are eager for improvement.
In fact, as recently as last week, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., led a group of fifteen Republican senators in sending a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., imploring him to let the Senate work. Outside conservative groups are making the same request.
How can Republicans in the Senate force action in the face of Democrat obstruction? Three simple things: Make Democrats SPEAK. Make them WORK. Make them VOTE. Details at link, natch.
Finally, trust the American people. Notwithstanding the media noise and the inside the beltway blather, the American people have common sense. They see through the games. To demonstrate this we need look no further than the latest government funding fight. The Democrat plan was to close the government hoping to force Republicans to swallow an amnesty bill. The geniuses inside the beltway claim that Republicans always take the blame for every shutdown, even when the Democrats are the obvious cause. But this is because usually, the Republicans cave.
This time, Republicans stuck to their guns. And the public saw through the cynical game the Democrats were playing, Sen. Schumer got smart and reversed course. They didn’t need 60 votes, or even 51. The bill passed unanimously, with consent. It didn’t even need a vote. It does seem like the titanic struggle ended with a (D) whimper.
Message to the Republican senators: Work hard, trust your principles, use the weapons at your disposal, and trust the American people, and victory will be yours.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/23/2018 00:00 ||
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Dems Should have Absentee Ballots Earlier Sent & Counted Barring Terror Attacks , Earthquakes & Hurricanes , Alas , Volcanoes 2 !! Tidal Wave Alerts , Also ~~
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Its rules and culture are intentionally designed to be slow and deliberative, in contrast to the quick-moving partisan House.
Except when the Dems are in power and legislation such as the (cough, cough) "Affordable Health Care Act" was rushed through without anyone reading it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
