Who is L. Paul bremmer? he was the guy who ran the US Operations in Iraq before we got those nice folks a semblance of a government which lead to a semi-functional government they got going on there right now.
so here is the blurb.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secretly incited Iraq's top Shia leader to declare holy war against US and British forces, according to Washington's former administrator in the country....
The report came from an extremely senior source, the supreme leader of Iraq's majority Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
According to Mr Bremer, the news was passed to him by Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a senior Shia politician involved in negotiations with the ayatollah. The Syrian leader had apparently recalled the Shia-led uprising against the British in 1920 and urged the Shia to repeat history....
In particular, he claims to have stressed to Washington the need to confront the firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Some British officials voiced their doubts over the policy, fearing it would spark a wider Shia revolt and some expressed irritation over Mr Bremer's account, suggesting it offered a partial view.
That crisis erupted in April 2004 when Sadr's militiamen rose up as the US attempted to take the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
Now I cut this out along with a little bit about good ole Moqtada al-Sadr because he will be coming up a little later here in my talk.
Syria isn't known for doing much in the Middle East on its own. While Syria does do a bunch of stuff influence wise over other countries and movements Syria largely does it as the willing (or unwilling) proxy agent of another larger power.
Hezbollah is a super example. The Syrians have stoked and supported Hezbollah in large part as a proxy for the Iranians.
I told people during the whole period when al-Sadr was uprising he was doing so on the order of the Iranian government. I said this for a very specific reason. Grand Ayatollah Sistani was doing some pretty wild things. He was advocating democracy and being supportive of the US efforts to enforce the Powell-Pottery Barn doctrine in Iraq.
Very early and shortly after the US occupation started but before much in the way of a provisional authority came to happen Syria was trying to stimulate a revolt. You factor this with the later al-Sadr brotherhood with hezbollah and I see the Iranians acting indirectly through the Syrians working to get Sistani on board with a Shia islamic revolt and he said no.
so much as I was telling people... al-Sadr was the plan b. This revelation seems to confirm that now more and more.
Sistani has seen the failure of the Iranian model first hand, and Sadr mearly wanted to regain his fathers position as a leading voice of Iraqi shia.
the story seems to work and the actors seem to work. Only time will tell if I am right and this is indeed the play I was watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment