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Last time I looked al-Sadr's followers were Iraqis, and it is their voices we are going to have vote/run the new Iraq. Why are they not "legitimate"?
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Sure, Mr. al-Sadr's devoted followers and rabble of a militia represent a few thousand Iraqi's, but they almost certainly do not represent the wishes of the majority of Iraqi Shiites, or indeed the wishes of the 25 million liberated residents of greater Iraq.
Muqtada rolled the dice in starting this small uprising, in a panicky move predicated by one of his closest advisors being arrested and in the closing of his newspaper propoganda organ. Allied occupation forces started to turn their attentions to the 30 year old's paramilitary forces, just as his rival Ayatotollah Sistani had clearly gained the loyalties and respect of most Shiites, and as al-Sadr saw the door closing on his megalomaniacal ambitions, he had to act against the Americans and the provisional Iraqi authority, or risk inevitable political impotence in this new Iraq.
Essentially, he wins if other Iraqi groups rally to his call for Islamic revolution, and he loses if he and his rabble of armed children and old men end up being surrounded and innoculated by American and National Iraqi forces. As of this moment, it looks like he is a loser...
Now, are Kerry's comments about the "legitimacy" of al-Sadr's as a "voice" of Iraqi's cogent?
Technically yes, but only in the sense he represents a fractional and tiny segment of the population of that recovering land. We'd see just how "legitimate" Saddam would have found al-Sadr's voice if he tried to mount this kind of revolutionary escapade back in the good old days. My guess is that the Mukhrabat would have been busy for weeks with Shiite genital electrocutions, finger-bone breaking, wife-raping, and bulldozing corpses into mass graves in the desert, if any ragtag al-Sadr Shiite militia's attempted to seize control of the recently renamed "Sadr" city...