Re: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side
On Nov 27, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Doug makes it sound like no one in Iraq has a political program, but that is not the case. Sadr does. The Mahdi Army is said to model itself on Hizballah, combining mass actions, social services, and armed resistance. That is the correct strategy, straight out of the Marxist manual for national liberation. In the Middle East, it’s populist Islamists like Sadr and Nasrallah who are better Marxist-Leninists than self-identified secular ones. — Yoshie
I see relief work, and armed defense of fellow Shiites, but a
political program? We could have had a pretty good idea what the
Bolsheviks would do when they took state power - they wrote about it
extensively. What would Sadr do? Kill and/or expel Sunnis? We don’t
know; maybe power would moderate him. In the US, the Christian right
run social services, but they come with religious strings attached
and could be viewed as a means of building loyalty. Is that their
political program?
Doug