al-Sadr Warns Washington - Be Out by New Years Eve

American troops are supposed to be gone from Iraq entirely by December 31, 2011.  That's just eight months from now, not much time to dismantle the US force and base structure.   In fact, the Americans have let it be known that they'd rather stay - indefinitely.  That's got bad boy Shiite Mullah Muqtada al-Sadr seeing red.  He's warned the Americans to be gone or else a guerrilla war starts 1 January, 2012.

...this is what the Sadrists sent as a gift card to the "liberators"; you'd better leave our land by the end of 2011, for good, as agreed. Or else one of the Pentagon's ultimate nightmares will be back; a revived, revamped Mahdi Army unleashing guerrilla tactics.

 The message came like clockwork, just one day after Pentagon head Robert Gates visited northern Iraq to convince the Nuri al-Maliki government to, well, keep occupying the country to an indefinite future. By then, the US State Department had already announced it wanted to keep an army of mercenaries and what could amount to thousands of bureaucrats in the largest US Embassy in the world. The mercenaries allegedly will protect the bureaucrats. Talk about American exceptionalism.

According to Muqtada, "The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army in a new statement which will be published later ... Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins." So if the US stays, Muqtada will turn Baghdad into a giant Tahrir Square - with the added bonus of commandos turning the Green Zone red and condemning contractors to road-kill status. The great 2011 Arab revolt keeps reinventing itself in myriad ways.

It's hard to imagine the American public tolerating a resumption of the carnage that beset US forces in Iraq just a few years ago.  Yet the Americans have legitimate concerns about a Shiite Iraq falling into step with the Mullahs of Tehran.

This brings back the one prescient comment made by America's former proconsul, L. Paul Bremer, who said that the important decisions about Iraq's future would all be made after the Americans were gone.