Sistani and Jews

Getting our $200 Billion Worth in Entertainment Value: On Sistani.org, the invaluable website of the Grand Ayatollah whom we've expended $200 billion to put in charge of Iraq, a reader found the following Q&A:

Question: Is purchasing Nokia mobile allowed or not?

Answer: His permissible in it say. But if the prvfic gues to Israel, it is not allowed to purchase it.

I'm not exactly clear what a "prvfic" is [profit?], but I don't think the neocons are going to get Iraq to get in bed with Israel anytime soon, as they had long hoped that Ahmed Chalabi would do (as Douglas Feith's law partner, West Bank settler Marc Zell revealed).

W. James Antle writes in Men's News Daily:

As the votes are tallied and the results continue to roll in, the religious Shiite political party linked to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani appears to be headed for a big win. The ticket associated with U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is trailing badly. Key Shiite leaders are now speaking openly of imposing some version of Islamic law on the country.

Let’s be frank: This is almost exactly the opposite of what most war supporters intended to achieve in Iraq. Put aside for a moment your affection for President Bush and your enthusiasm for the Republican Party. Would you have wanted to go to war to replace a secular state with one ruled by clerics?

Yes, Dick Cheney insists he doesn’t see any theocracy looming on the Iraqi horizon. Maybe the newly elected government will prove capable of bringing the Sunnis back into the fold. There is some debate about whether Sistani and other Shiite clerics are actually as close to Iran as is often assumed. Hardly anybody, outside the stubborn insurgency, misses Saddam Hussein. It won’t be all that difficult for the new government to be an improvement over the Baathists of old.

None of this, however, adds up to a big picture of what we are trying to accomplish in Iraq or how this intersects with the broader global war on terror...

A lot of conservative thinking in the post-9/11 war on terror has been mired in past conflicts. Norman Podhoretz has described the struggle against international terrorism as “World War IV,” preceded by the Cold War as World War III. And the Cold War seems to be the frame of reference most conservatives use in analyzing the anti-terror war.

The analogy runs roughly like this: Militant Islam, or Islamism, has replaced communism. George W. Bush is reprising the role of Ronald Reagan, the leader who will finally prevail in our nation’s central geopolitical struggle. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech was his Evil Empire moment and the stirring rhetoric of his second inaugural address was his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

This easy appeal to the recent past is one reason conservative Republicans are so reluctant to turn on President Bush even when the rest of the world opposes him and actual events don’t appear to go his way. After all, many of the same liberals and Europeans derided the 40th president as a know-nothing cowboy whose bellicosity put the world at risk of nuclear war...

Conservatives would serve them better with a more thoughtful response than merely re-fighting the last one.