how to do regime change VII
From the Asia Times

BAGHDAD On Friday it took a fiery sermon by the Sunni cleric Dr Ahmad Al Qubaisee to unleash Baghdad's full-throated Muslim religious fury at US occupation forces.

On Monday, they didn't need a cleric at all.

Or, make that, rather, that they did need a cleric. To be precise, they needed the Shi'ite Ayatollah Muhammed Al Fartuzi - and they needed him now.

Trouble was, nobody seemed to know where he was.

In what is quickly becoming a recurring metaphor for the multi-layered political and religious paradox in which the United States finds itself deeply immersed in Iraq, Monday and Tuesday afternoon witnessed an angry throng of chanting Muslims facing down a badly outnumbered US military contingent in Baghdad, with the poor soldiers sitting there in harm's way having not the least clue as to why this was happening or what to do about it.

This is the sort of disaster that happens when an administration ignores any history except its own spin. Someone in the Bush administration should read up on the First Anglo-Afghan War. In the unlikely event they bother they should read with special care the words of Lord Auckland, the Viceroy of India:

...the whole thing was unintelligible to me...

It is what happens when imperial adventurers occupy a foreign nation without any political understanding of what the people of that nation might wish. And those who the pay the cost are the Iraqis suffering the white man's burden and young soldiers deprived of political intelligence trying to deal with an angry people.