Army Of Madness

Nothing good is going to come from this, folks.  Nothing good at all, especially for the people of Iraq.

It had been quite the morning for Jamli Umm Saif, a mother of four. After morning prayers on Saturday, she sent off her husband and eldest son to join a military parade by the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia run by the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Then she rang up her girlfriends, and told them to come watch the parade wearing white shrouds draped over their black chadors, as a sign that they too, the women of the Mahdi Army, were ready for martyrdom.

“Yes, we are women,” said Umm Saif, a nickname meaning “mother of Saif,” giggling from behind her black face cover. “But don’t be mistaken. We can fight too. We will all fight.”

Here in the Shiite heartland of Iraq, volunteers have revived battalions of the Mahdi Army, one of the dominant groups preparing for battle following the call for a “defensive jihad” June 13 by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the highest authorities in the Shiite faith.

From the sidelines of the parade on a main street in Najaf, Umm Saif, 47, and her friends waved green flags, one of the colors of Shiite Islam, as their men marched by the thousands, singing in support of Mr. Sadr.

The cleric himself, who only recently returned from Iran, where he is studying theology, was not present, but his “army,” which he had disbanded in 2008, seemed to be back in full strength.

The long-predicted sectarian civil war in Iraq is back, and we bear the responsibility for giving birth to it.  There's also nothing that we can do militarily that won't make this worse and won't cause more deaths than lives it might save.

But the match that lit this powder keg?  That was in Bush and Cheney's grubby little hands.