FOUR YEARS AFTER THE FALL. It's the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and thousands of Iraqis protested today, demanding that the U.S. leave the country. "Demonstrators ripped apart American flags and tromped across a Stars and Stripes rug flung on the road between the two holy cities for the huge march," the Post reports. These were not Sunni dead-enders and former Baathists -- they were Shiites, organized by Muqtada al-Sadr. One may take it as a dispiriting sign to see such robust protests from Shiites four years after the invasion, but one can always take heart in the prescient words of Charles Krauthammer from May 2003, when he wrote of another anti-American Shiite protest, "the Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority." This minority might make a bid for power, Krauthammer assured us, but, like the Soviet-backed communists in post-World War II Italy and France, they will fail. If we're still dealing with these protests in another four years, we can check in with Krauthammer for an update.
Meanwhile, this has been said plenty already, but probably bears repeating: as distasteful and objectionable as one might rightly find al-Sadr, with reports coming in of renewed clashes between his Mahdi Army and U.S.-backed forces, it continues to be unclear what fighting both sides of another country's civil war simultaneously is going to accomplish in the way of coherent strategic objectives.
--Sam Rosenfeld
