Shia Showdown

Published August 18, 2004

The claims and counter-claims make it hard to discern the strategies behind the showdown in Najaf, and the language that is used blurs the situation even more. U.S. military spokesmen, for example, always call the young men who are defending the rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr "anti-Iraqi forces," although not one in a hundred of them has ever been outside Iraq. But you can guess why the U.S. authorities in Iraq...