In Iraq, radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is suddenly changing his tune, after getting a call on the CluePhone from the US Army: Does the Shi’ite turban fit?

Muqtada al-Sadr … issued a conciliatory statement on Saturday, November 1. The young Sadr and his followers in the Army of the Mahdi have been increasingly clashing with US troops, as well as more moderate Shi’ite groups. Alarmed by US army threats that he would be arrested as a rabble rouser threatening Iraqi stability, Sadr issued a statement asking American troops to spare Iraqi lives, calling for unity and brotherhood between the Americans and the Iraqis.

He stated that Saddam Hussein was a “sinful aggressor” and that he and his backers were the real and only enemies of Iraq, not the Americans. Sadr described Americans as guests in Iraq, adding that they were “peace loving people”. He also stated that the Iraqi people only want good for the Americans (credit for translation of Sadr’s statement goes to Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan ).

These statements were a repudiation of Sadr’s earlier comparison of the IGC and the new Iraqi regime to Saddam’s government. Sadr has been lashing out at the US as a result of Pentagon threats to arrest him. Many of his followers have already been arrested and his house was searched last month after he declared a shadow government and an unarmed militia that was in fact heavily armed.

This article at the Asia Times (whose credibility is not always impeccable) contains a very interesting revelation about the radical Islamic fantasy ideology, as it pertains to the US effort to liberate and rebuild Iraq:

However, Sadr’s radical departure from his previous hostility to the US was contradicted in private the same day by one of his main deputies in Baghdad. Seyid Hasan Naji al-Musawi, the 38-year-old imam of Sadr City’s Muhsin mosque and commander of Sadr’s Army of the Mahdi in Baghdad, said that the final days were approaching in which the Mahdi would return. Shi’ites believe that the 12th imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi, a descendant of Mohammed, went into an invisible supernatural location when he was a child, and he has ruled the world from there, but that he will one day return to the corporeal world and restore justice, accompanied by Jesus Christ.

Musawi declared that America’s real purpose in coming to Iraq was to kill the Mahdi. “Iraq will be the end of America,” he said, “the Mahdi will be coming soon and when he comes he will kill the Jewish leadership,” which he equated with the Americans, adding that Julius Caesar was Jewish, and the Jews were the Romans. Musawi quoted a verse from the Koran prognosticating the eventual defeat of the Jews. He added that the Mahdi would be coming from the Hejaz area of Saudi Arabia, accompanied by Jesus, and he would also kill many clerics who wear the imama, or Shi’ite turban.