By Cernig
Well, I guess Mookie was listening to the message Sistani was (probably) sending - and plans to prove he isn't dead yet, again.
Anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a mass protest on Friday against negotiations between Washington and Baghdad on keeping US troops in the country beyond 2008.
''We invite Iraqis to join us for a mass demonstration after Friday prayers unless the government cancels this agreement,'' Sadr said in a statement issued by his office in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf today.
He said the protests would continue nationwide until the government agreed to hold a referendum on the continued US presence. Sadr pulled his bloc out of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government last year in protest at his refusal to negotiate a timetable for a US troop withdrawal....''We will collect a petition with signatures of the Iraqi people, who are against this deal,'' Sadr said.
In Najaf, Sadr's spokesman, Salah al-Ubaidi, said: ''History will not look well upon this government if it signs this agreement without consulting the people. It will put Iraq in crisis.''
Sistani was reported recently as saying he strongly objected to a 'security accord' between the US and Iraq and that he would not allow Iraq to sign such a deal with "the US occupiers" as long as he was alive. The source was an Iranian PressTV report but Sistani has historically been opposed to a permanent US presence in Iraq while saying that peaceful political methods should be used to end the occupation rather than violence. Either the PressTV report was a plant as part of a conspiracy so that Iran-controlled Sadr could then make this statement seeming to agree with Sistani, thus piggy-backing the latters credibility and respect, (this will doubtless be the US pro-occupation Right's interpretation)...or Sistani and Sadr are singing from the same hymn-sheet because Sadr simply wants to piggy-back Sistani's prestige while simultaneously avoiding having the Iraqi Army shoot at his people.
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