Q&A with Al Sadr

You need to notice that there is no reac­tion from the Maliki’s gov­ern­ment or other polit­i­cal blocs on Bush’s plan to with­draw 8000 troops, except this one issued by the Sadrists, con­sid­er­ing Bush dis­cion as a polit­i­cal maneu­ver for the pres­i­den­tial election.

Simaism , head of the Sadr Trend polit­i­cal Bureau said:

The with­drawal of 8000 sol­diers from 140,000 is not sched­ul­ing a timetable.

A Q&A released by Muq­tada Al-Sadr answer­ing some ques­tions asked by his fol­lower and I will trans­late the impor­tant points only:

After the split of Mahdi Army to two parts (resis­tance and Mumahi­doon), our ques­tions are about the sec­ond part (Mumahi­doon) to explain this cul­tural, edu­ca­tional project.

There are some inter­est­ing issues in this doc­u­ment. He answers ques­tion III with few points:

“Why we need to sign a paper con­firms that we will not get our­selves involved in pol­i­tics and mil­i­tary mat­ters?”

Fol­low­ing my father’s line, he asked for a writ­ten pledge of no polit­i­cal involvement.

But with point five he admit­ted of mak­ing mistakes:

What we mean with “pol­i­tics” is this kind of “pol­i­tics” cir­cu­lates around in the coun­try, com­pet­ing on [gov­ern­ment] posi­tions, [min­is­te­r­ial] bags and sta­tus. Although we thought before that putting the believ­ers in it can save pol­i­tics from devi­a­tion. What hap­pened is the oppo­site, putting the believ­ers in [the polit­i­cal process] cor­rupts them and not sav­ing politics.

In Q6 — point 3, again, he admit­ted another mistake:

Sadr Trend sealed itself and prob­a­bly this was one of its major mis­takes. This project is like a gate opens on the believ­ers in gen­eral and Iraqis in particular.

One thing needs to be said:

Although Al-Sadr admits that there were “mis­takes”, he throws the blames on his fol­low­ers and not on him­self or the lead­ers of the Sadr Trend.