"Et Tu, Reality?"

If the leaders, command structures and minions of The Greatest Country Ever would look up to stop pleasuring themselves for a minute, they might realize the appealing little light bobbing and playing down in the dark trench we're is connected to a gaping, tooth-filled maw which is about to tear us in half. Not being a watcher of the Sunday Talking Head shows, I don't know what kind of coverage or treatement this story will get. But it's a Big One. After a long period of silence and official acquiescence, Iraq's leading Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr has called for Iraqi unity, and for attacks, against US forces there. The Mahdi Army and various other groups Al-Sadr has influence over will attempt to de-escalate their reprisal and ethnic cleansing efforts against Sunni minorities and turn their considerable energies to making life harder for American troops. His clarion call includes the Iraqi Army and Police:

"You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don't walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy," the statement said. Its authenticity could not be verified.

In the statement, al-Sadr -- who commands an enormous following among Iraq's majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government -- also encouraged his followers to attack only American forces, not fellow Iraqis.

"God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them -- not against the sons of Iraq," the statement said, in an apparent reference to clashes between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi troops in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. "You have to protect and build Iraq."

Al-Sadr is the single most powerful man in Iraq, and the erstwhile Prime Minister (Al-Maliki) is his follower by blood, by loyalty, and by inclination. The deal they cut between themselves was to use American forces to perform the finishing touches on Sunni ethnic cleansing in and around selected areas of Baghdad. Al-Sadr agreed to stand down and shut up while it kicked into high gear, which he did. I've spared regular readers of this blog the first-person reports of what this project felt or looked like on the ground, but there was nothing clean and little ethnic about what went on. It was grisly, and the fact US troops were forced to participate in it is, mark my words, a disgrace which will come back to haunt the families, cities, and streets of this country all too soon. The other shoe of the unholy Shia deal engendered by an illegal, craven US occupation is now dropping. Moqtada Al-Sadr is stepping forward to make Nouri Al-Maliki his Pinnochio and take power through him.

The best thing that can be done about this statement is to get out some rose-colored beta-blockers and say "its authenticity could not be verified," which the article endeavors to do. Let the pink scales fall from your eyes, clean the wax out of your ears. The statement carries Al-Sadr's official seal, and really, this development is not exactly coming out of left field. Military analysts capable of preserving a little objectivity, including the amateur Yours Truly here (one thing in my favor, nobody's paying me nuthin'), have said from its outset that "the Surge" offensive would probably generate a few months of relative quiet by displacing insurgents into safe areas. It also coincided with Winter in Iraq, with cold weather naturally helping to keep Sunni guerilla activity levels down. Now Spring has arrived, and Al-Sadr has sprung an attack on the Surge's rear.

It doesn't take too much reading between the lines of the quotes above to figure out that Al-Sadr is saying the Iraqi Army should actively support Shia insurgents against US forces. In fact, it takes none at all. He's saying it loud and clear. He's telling them to take their guns and training and turn them on US troops. Who trained these troops? Who paid them? Who gave them guns? Money withheld from me and mine called "Social Security" did. Bonds issued in our names called "Treasuries" did. Collective delusions called "Katie Couric" did.

Monumental stupidity is easy to deal with, because, well, it's monumental. In one spot. You can go around it, if you choose. You can pull a monument down. The kind of stupidity America has erected and has now institutionalized is infinitely worse. It's everywhere. It's as pervasive as a cloud of roiling poison gas which stupefies everything in its toxic range, and tries to kill everything outside it. It makes wastelands, and calls them democracies. How long can the filters in our gasmasks last? How long before our despotic leaders are forced to turn and say, "Et tu, Reality?"