{"id":1752,"date":"2008-05-29T03:06:11","date_gmt":"2008-05-29T03:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-05-29T03:07:29","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T03:07:29","slug":"looking_for_wha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1752","title":{"rendered":"Looking For What One Expects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Longtime sparring partner Eric Martin, over at Democracy Arsenal, echoed super-Iraq-expert Juan Cole in pointing to the AP story on Al-Sistani moving closer to Al-Sadr<\/a> by legitimizing attacks on Alliance troops – back on May 23.<\/p>\n

Reacting to the story<\/a> that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is beginning to take a more militant stand in opposition to the US occupation, Kevin Drum<\/a> asks, “Why now?” I briefly mentioned some of the possible motivations in my post<\/a> on the Sistani story (as did Cernig<\/a> and Matt Duss<\/a>), but Juan Cole<\/a> offers a good summary of some of the more compelling speculation.<\/p>\n

To reiterate (as Cole himself does), this is only plausible speculation and there is no way to know Sistani’s motivations for sure. What is known for sure, however, is that Sistani’s shift on this topic (or, perhaps, willingness to vocalize an unchanged position) is a severe setback to those that envision a 100 year presence in Iraq – complete with massive permanent bases, theme parks and luxury hotels:<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I saw the story and started chasing it down with some concern. Here’s what I found<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A close source to grand ayatollah Ali Sistani\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office on Friday denied news agencies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 reports the Shiite cleric issued a fatwa permiting taking up weapons to drive the foreign occupation forces out of Iraq.<\/p>\n

\n“The reports of issuing fatwa by the Shiite cleric Sistani permiting taking up arms to drive foreign troops out of Iraq were baseless”.<\/p>\n

\nInternational news agencies reported Sistani issued a fatwa, an edict, legalizing Iraqis to hold up arms to drive US troops out of Iraq.<\/p>\n

\nThe source, a cleric from Karbala associated with Sistani office,pointed out “Sistani\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stance is clear since toppling the former regime(of Saddam Hussein) by calling for sticking to civil resistence to drive foreign troops out of Iraq”.<\/p>\n

\nAli Sistani, living in Najaf, is the top cleric and hold a strong sway over Shiites in Iraq and a number muslim countries.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article – dated May 23. On Democracy Arsenal – or Kevin Drum’s site, where Eric is guest-blogging? Crickets. At least Juan Cole had the candor to acknowledge<\/a> (even if he’s dismissive) the updated information.<\/p>\n

The reality of Arab politics is close to the definition of ‘obscure’. Paying close attention is a good thing. But it’d be nice to see Martin acknowledge how easy it is to look into the obscurity and see what you want – and expect – to see. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What did the AP story on Sistani mean?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}