Lessons From Najaf

There are a lot of media post-mortems about the Siege Of Najaf.

The BBC's Roger Hardy says Najaf shows the Allawi government's weakness. They talked tough - as did their US masters - but once again they failed to achieve their goals:

... once again, Moqtada Sadr's prestige has risen. Once again, he has walked free. Once again, he has refused to disband his militia.

al-Sistani's prestige has also risen considerably, or perhaps I should say that his influence has been dramatically demonstrated to any who doubted it.

Allawi's public support, however, has plummetted to new depths. To ordinary Iraqis, troubled by the sight of their countrymen fighting one another and appalled by the descration of sacred sites, he is looking more and more like Chalabi version 2.0.

The common feature of the anger driving different Iraqi groups, whether Sunni or Shia, is resentment at the US military presence in Iraq - and a feeling that the Allawi government is a puppet of America.

The battle of Najaf is over, but the propaganda war has just begun. Just look at the finger-pointing over who is responsible for the
piles of corpses.