I dont think that there can be much doubt that his primary goal is to become the de facto leader of the Iraqi people. Al Sadr is the top anti US Shiite cleric in Iraq. He is calling for early elections now with the aim of displacing the current Prime Minister who is Nouri al Maliki. Al Sadr has waited impatiently for the US to pull out of the country so that he can make his power play. The call for early elections is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to manipulate the situation and take control.
Tensions are rising after Maliki, who belongs to the Shiite sect attempted to have Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi arrested on the charge of running death squads. He has also asked Parliament to fire another Sunni leader. I think that you can see the direction of the situation in Iraq and as sad as it may seem I believe that this is the exact shape of things to come in the post United States occupied version of that country. The head of Sadr's bloc, part of the ruling Shi'ite led government, said parliament should be dissolved to try resolve the spat.
We are in a new phase and have found a lot of problems which give no stability to Iraq... so we will discuss this subject with the National Alliance because we are part of it," Bahaa al-Araji, the head of Sadr's bloc, said in a statement in which he also called for "new and early elections."
The existence of the government is fragile to say the least. The presence of the US kept the wolves at bay but there are too many factions which were waiting in the winge to attempt to wrest control of the new government.
Al Sadr is not the only person waiting in the wings in a quest to gain power. The presence of the US would have continued to halp the Iraqis while they solidified the new government but they chose to not allow troops to remain after the designated pullout. Now dont get me wrong in this: The Iraqis should govern themselves. The US does not need to establish any type of permanent presence there. The Iraqi people have every right to their own governance but if it fails it will cause all of the years of war and suffering to be for nothing.
The US has wasted many billions of dollars in the war effort there along with the lives of many troops. I dont want to marginalize the involvement of foreign allies there. There has been expenditures of lives, equipment, and funds from many other nations in the worldwide effort in Iraq, but the United States took on the lions share of the responsibility.
The world in a sense has invested in the freedom of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis have the right to govern themselves any way that they want but it would be a shame if the results of the recent war there turn out to be as disastrous as the war itself.
Military Ring Express
