Needlenose

The street protests have finally spread to Iraq.  Surprising only because it took so long – I would think the Iraqi people are suffering more than anybody in the Arabic world nowadays, along anyway in which you wish to measure quality of life. During the early days of the Shrubya occupation, co-blogger Swopa was fond of discussing the role of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s role as the behind the scenes ‘power broker,’ who could always pull the card of a popular uprising to stop the worst overreaches of Shrubya’s various Mayberry Machinations.

I had once mused that a real popular uprising could upstage Sistani and really bring about an end to the occupation (a concept that Swopa laughingly disparaged).  Well it seems like Sistani is in fact trying to get in front of the popular uprising train, except that it has already left the station.  Hard to say though if this is in fact the beginning of the end for Maliki, or whether this is just another bloody miserable episode in the string of misery that has become the lot of Iraq since the Repugs decided to trash the place and seize the oil