Who Calls The Shots In Iraq?

Juan Cole says the decision to demonize Moqtada Al Sadr (including closing down his newspaper and charging him with murder) came from Dan Senor:

Senor is said to have acted on instructions from Neoconservatives in the Pentagon, and to have kept Paul Bremer, his putative boss, out of the loop...

I speculated at the time that the Neocons came after Muqtada because he had objected so loudly to Sharon's murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the clerical leader of the Hamas Party... And then Muqtada had promised to be the right hand of Hamas in Iraq, and to open Hamas offices all around the country.

In other words, his position was completely intolerable to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Likud Party, and their American fellow-travelers among the Neocons.