The sources say that the pressure of these lobbies for the religious parties with militias in the south even reached the grand ayatollahs in Najaf. The Pakistani cleric Bashir al-Najafi warned of the possible eruption of a popular revolution if the government did not address the pressing issues [of security] and the problem of services. His office issued a statement in which the grand ayatollahs said, "We fear the coming of a day when we cannot restrain a revolution of the people, with all its unsavory consequences." He said that the Iraqi government must take over security altogether from the foreign forces in Iraq.

Al-Zaman says that al-Najafi would not speak out on these political issues on his own, and that his remarks almost certainly reflect a consensus among the four grand ayatollahs of Najaf (among whom Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is first among equals.) (my emphasis)

So that's what our mission in Iraq has been reduced to - ceding most of Iraq to Iranian control and acknowledging that a civil war is now inevitable and we can do nothing to stop it. Worse, the only thing we can possibly hope to accomplish is to prevent Al Qaeda from turning Iraq into its new terrorist training ground, something it was entirely incapable of doing prior to our invasion.

Put another way, in exchange for the thousands of lives lost, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, and destruction of U.S. credibility as a result of our invasion, the best we can hope for is what we already had - a situation where Al Qaeda cannot run free in Iraq - along with a vicious civil war and control by Iranian mullahs over most of Iraq. And that is what one of the leading neconservative advocates of the war is saying.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert clumsily mispronounced his name, introducing Maliki as "Malocky." But when he finally started to speak, it was malarkey. ...

Maliki’s message was a simple one, and he delivered it while standing in front of his puppet master, the scowling Dick Cheney. ...

It's fair to say that if America remains in Iraq through January 2009, it will be the fault of Hillary and Bill ("Re-Elect Joe") Clinton. [Ouch!] ...

During Maliki's dead-man-walking performance on the Hill, the applause was lackluster. Members seemed distracted and unenthusiastic, and Cheney looked downright glum.

Did Maliki headline the sectarian bloodletting and ethnic cleansing in Iraq, the death squads and militias? No. Did Maliki present a plan for securing Iraq’s capital? No. Instead, he stuck to the Republican Party's 2006 electoral talking points: that Iraq is the central front in the so-called Global War on Terrorism. He cited 9/11, a crime perpetrated by what he called "impostors of Islam," and he portrayed the violence in Iraq as the direct continuation of America’s effort against al-Qaida ...

Of course, all of this is nonsense. The war in Iraq is a full-fledged civil war, pitting the Sunni community against the Shiites, with the Kurds busily plotting their breakaway state in the north and the seizure of Kirkuk and Iraq’s northern oil fields. Al-Qaida, if it is involved at all, is a peripheral force. But by emphasizing Iraq as the center of the GWOT, Maliki was parroting the Republican Party line and daring Democrats to say otherwise.

Some Democrats, such as Reid, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, and House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, tried to make a big deal of Maliki’s refusal to condemn Hezbollah, going so far as to suggest that Maliki’s invitation to speak to Congress be repudiated. (In the end, Reid and Pelosi relented, dutifully joining the pall-bearers who carried Maliki into the House chamber.) But in fact, these Democrats have a point: Maliki’s regime, despite being installed by the Pentagon’s puppeteers, maintains close ties to Iran, further complicating the ability of the United States to halt the civil war and disarm Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.

The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails, is a revolutionary Shiite religious party not that much different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s. The Dawa was in exile in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut and it formed a shadowy terror wing called, generically, Islamic Jihad. The IJ cell of the Dawa attacked the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, in an operation probably directed by the Tehran branch, which was close to Khomeini.

My understanding is that Nuri al-Maliki was the bureau chief of the Dawa cell in Damascus in the 1980s. He must have been closely involved with the Iraqi Dawa in Beirut, which in turn was intimately involved in Hizbullah. I am not saying he himself did anything wrong. I don't know what he was doing in specific, other than trying to overthrow Saddam, which was heroic. But, did they really think he was going to condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?

And if he did, do they think that the Shiite religious parties that backed him would let him stay in office (they are the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa, and the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr)?

... Things have changed, and I am not at all suggesting that a vindictive attitude is appropriate, but Dawa has a background as a terrorist organization. While in Tehran, it spun off a shadowy set of special ops units generically called "Islamic Jihad," which operated in places like Kuwait and Lebanon. The Dawa's Islamic Jihad appears to have been at the nexus of splinter groups that later, in 1982, began to coalesce into Hezbollah (the 1983 truck bombing of US Marines is often blamed on "Hezbollah," but that organization barely existed then.) The current al-Dawa leadership repudiates these anti-West actions, and blames them on cells of al-Dawa temporarily taken over by Iranian elements. The arrest lists do not support this excuse.