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Muqtada al-Sadr is a half-pint Shiite cleric in Iraq who is almost certainly being funded and controlled by Iran. When things got nasty in Falluja, he (or his owners) decided it was a great time to rise up in armed revolt.
The Mehdi Army wasn't big enough to actually have a chance of winning, but that wasn't the point. I think that the hope was that simultaneous uprisings among Shiites and Sunnis might cause the Americans to come down hard militarily, using indiscriminate and excessive force, angering and polarizing Iraqi Arabs and inspiring further unrest and opposition....
....Al-Sadr is still loose, and he still has some supporters. But he took his best shot, failed utterly, and he won't get a second chance. He is now marginalized, little more than a leader of a criminal gang which once again rules over a couple of slums on the outskirts of Baghdad, a minor but tolerable pain waiting to be eliminated when the time is right.
War is conflict, but not all conflict is war. Nonetheless, some conflicts which are wars have things in common with conflicts which are not wars. In the latter you don't fight with bullets and bombs, and defeated opponents don't necessarily die or land in jail. But the defeat can be just as real, even if less deadly. And sometimes the stakes are actually higher.
A few days ago I read an editorial in the Telegraph about Michael Moore, by Matthew d'Ancona. It seems to overly emphasize Moore's influence and impact in Europe, but that's not really surprising since that's where d'Ancona lives.
The morning after I saw Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, I visited my local book shop to inspect the titles it stocked by the director himself and by other writers implacably hostile to George W Bush. On the counter was a pile of Moore's most recent bestseller, Dude, Where's My Country?. And his 2001 polemic, Stupid White Men, which has sold 350,000 copies in Britain alone, was also prominently displayed.
In the same genre, though not by Moore, the shop offered such gems as The Bush-Hater's Handbook, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, Ugly Americans, What's Wrong with America?, and Amerika Psycho: Behind Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity. According to the assistant who served me, there are now so many of these instant America-bashing books that the store simply cannot stock them all. When I told her that Moore's new film was compelling cinema and had to be seen, whether or not you agreed with its politics, she snorted with derision: "You just wonder how many people in the States will get to see it, since they live in a country under censorship."
Now, one angry bookseller does not a political trend make. But when you bear in mind that Stupid White Men has already sold more than three million copies worldwide and that Fahrenheit 9/11 took $24 million at the US box office last weekend - the first documentary ever to top the American film charts in its opening days - it becomes less easy to dismiss the fat man in the baseball cap as a marginal figure. Indeed, it looks to me as though Michael Moore is pretty much at the centre of things these days. The subculture has invaded the mainstream: it is an army of occupation.
What I found myself wondering, after I read that, was whether Michael Moore may, in the end, turn out to be the American Loonie Left's Muqtada al-Sadr.
He's become the rallying point. He's raised the flag, and the most motivated LL's are flocking to support him. He's become their poster boy, their public face. He provides a focal point; he's a magnet around which they can gather and organize.
He has chosen the ground they will defend and it is dreadful ground indeed.
His movies and books sell really well in Europe. But that isn't as important as D'Ancona thinks.
As I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 - a ferocious attack on Bush's record since September 11 and a clarion-call for "regime change" in Washington - it struck me that Michael Moore's critics are missing the point by directing their wrath at the dodgy detail of his work. Certainly, some scenes in the film are downright offensive. In particular, the slow-motion images of an allegedly idyllic Iraq before last year's liberation campaign - children smiling, kites flying - are an insult to the one million or more Iraqis who died as a consequence of Saddam Hussein's policies.[/quote}
