"No, no for Satan. No, no for America. No, no for the occupation. No, no for Israel," he chanted in a call and response with the audience at the start of his speech. He repeated his long-standing call for U.S. forces to leave Iraq.
"We demand the withdrawal of the occupation forces, or the creation of a timetable for such a withdrawal," he said. "I call upon the Iraqi government not to extend the occupation even for a single day."
He also condemned fighting between his Mahdi Army militia and Iraqi security forces, saying it "served the interests of the occupiers." Instead, he said the militia should turn to peaceful protests, such as demonstrations and sit-ins, he said.
Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought U.S. troops to a virtual standstill in 2004, but to avoid renewed confrontation he ordered his militants off the streets when the U.S. began its security crackdown in the Baghdad area 14 weeks.
Al-Sadr's associates say his strategy is based partly on a belief that Washington will soon start reducing troop strength, leaving a void in Iraq's security and political power structure that he can fill.
Why is he back inside Iraq? Perhaps he needed to return to counter the loss of his ministers in the government to replacements. Which would say something about the significance of this action, eh? Perhaps he finished his 3-month IED assembly course in Tehran.
But that is perhaps irrelevant. As long as he is back, can't the Iraqis finally arrest him or plant him six feet under? On this point, I'd like to correct a common error made in the AP article--Sadr did not fight us to a standstill in August 2004. We beat the snot out of him and then didn't finish him off because the Iraqi government said they'd rather deal with him.
And now he's still here as the result of that decision. Further, his belief in our pending retreat is yet another consequence of our Congress fighting tooth and nail to lose this war. Add Sadr as another price for that dissent our Left is conducting.
Admit it, it would be easy to imagine some of our representatives in Congress chanting right back at Sadr. God love 'em. 'Cause I sure won't.
UPDATE: Demonstrating that his presence isn't quite intimidating us, we nailed the leader of a Mahdi Army cell bringing in EFPs and agents trained in Iran. When the Mahdi Army gathered up to attack the raiding party, he hit them from the air:
A day after radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr resurfaced to end nearly four months in hiding and demand U.S. troops leave Iraq, American forces raided his Sadr City stronghold and killed five suspected militia fighters in air strikes Saturday.
In the South, the British sent the same message:
Hours after the cleric spoke in at a key Shiite shrine in Kufa, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, the notorious leader of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the city of Basra was killed in a shootout as British and Iraq troops tried to arrest him, police and the British military said, further inflaming tensions in the Shiite areas of southern Iraq.
It is turning out that Sadr is not as potent a force as I feared before the surge. What is important is whether he is still powerful enough to cause us serious problems. These actions against Sadr's boys certainly convey the message that we aren't quaking in our boots at the thought of the Idiot Sadr strutting about inside Iraq.
