''What happens when you launch premature strikes on a neighborhood-based group like the Mahdi Army is that you just end up convincing their neighborhoods that the occupiers are the enemy, and the Mahdi boys -- local guys you've known all your life -- are heroes, defending your glorious slum from the foreigners and their lackeys. By the time a homegrown group like Sadr's is ready to "announce itself" on the streets,
it's put in years of serious grassroots work winning over the locals block by block. The Mahdi Army runs its own little world in the neighborhoods it controls. It distributes food to the poor, deals out rough justice to the local criminals, and runs the checkpoints that keep Sunni suicide bombers off the block
How the U.S. Just Got Schooled by a 'Rag-Tag' Neighborhood Army in Iraq | Alternet
Sadrists also: ''stepped in and foiled the apparently planned chaos and looting in major Iraqi cities. Later on, it insisted on open general elections and the withdrawal of foreign troops, and questioned the rationality of having a divisional and sectarian constitution, a federalist system, and prevailing government corruption. In recent months, it vehemently denounced sectarian and ethnic cleansing and provided refuge and assistance to more than 40,000 displaced families ... The most significant and possible decisive act initiated by the Movement in safe-guarding Iraq is when it foiled the plan to cleanse Baghdad of its indigenous people and separate it from the center and the south of the country ... the Movement is the only force that reasonably expresses the aspiration of Iraqis for freedom and dignity. In fact, it is unimaginable that preserving Iraqi political and cultural integrity is possible without free and full participation of the Sadrist Movement in the political process.
Iraq is on the verge of collapse and a full-scale civil war is certain to erupt if the Sadrist Movement is attacked.
Targeting Sadrists, Targeting Iraq | Conflict Resolutions and World Security Solutions | worldsecuritynetwork.com
By contrast ''Bush's guy Maliki leads the Dawa Party'' -- as I have posted here before, Dawa attacked the foreign embassy in Kuwait and killed Americans:
12 December 1983
Kuwait City, Kuwaital-Dawa truck bomb outside Embassy 6 -
Attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
These Al Daawa murderers are still at large and have always been among the real enemies of the USA.
Another link which shows it was Sadrists who were attacked:
Provocative US Attack On Shiite Militia In Iraq By James Cogan
