MYRIAM MARQUEZ High price to pay for making al-Sadr hero

America's war president may want to take a lesson from an old saying: Hell hath no fury ... like a radical Shiite cleric scorned.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a grand ayatollah killed by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in 1999, isn't high up on the Islamic hierarchy, but he's a hothead loaded with firepower and young supporters from some of southern Iraq's poorest Shiite enclaves. When the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Sadr's newspaper recently, well, all hell broke loose.
How can a nation that stands for democracy and a free press shut down a newspaper that's critical of that nation's occupation forces?
Dangerous call.
Yes, there's a war and, yes, al-Sadr's newspaper may well have been printing lies to incite a riot, but there were other ways to deal with al-Sadr that wouldn't turn him into a hero, which is what the raid accomplished.
As it was, al-Sadr had been marginalized by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a highly respected cleric who has been critical of the authority's proposals but nevertheless has counseled Shiites to show restraint.
Now al-Sadr is claiming to be al-Sistani's military wing. Preposterous.
U.S. officials say al-Sadr has 5,000 armed men, tops. But al-Sadr's supporters claim they have up to 50,000. Whom should we believe?
Crying wolf
This White House's credibility is in question on everything from its crying wolf on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to its knowledge about the threat Al-Qaida posed before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The timing of this escalating violence in Iraq couldn't be worse for President Bush, whose national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, testified Thursday before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
As more American troops are killed, it's not just the Sunnis beholden to Saddam who U.S. officials must worry about. About a half-dozen towns and Baghdad neighborhoods controlled by al-Sadr's militiamen have been attacking coalition forces.
Al-Sadr, meanwhile, makes proclamations in hiding, calling on men to take to the streets. As much as Shiites hated the way Saddam favored the Sunnis, of which he is one, they are growing fearful that the Bush administration didn't go to Iraq to "liberate" the country but to take the oil.
Reports of Shiite fighters from Sadr City and Sunni mujadeen from Fallujah coming together to plot against U.S. forces reinforce just how delicate the situation is as the June 30 deadline looms for the coalition to turn over Iraq to a transitional government led by Iraqis. How U.S. forces treat religious symbols can make or break this military operation.
When U.S. forces raided an office April 4, looking for al-Sadr's weapons in predominantly Shiite Khadamiya, a guard working for al-Sadr claimed soldiers ripped a poster of al-Sadr's father and entered a holy room where shoes are verboten. As word spread that U.S. forces had broken an unsteady truce that left certain neighborhoods to al-Sadr's militia and that the prayer room had been stomped on by American soldiers, the response from frustrated, angry and dishonored Shiites was predictable. They went on the attack.
The United States accuses al-Sadr, a lower-level cleric in Iraq, of masterminding the murder last year of Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a rival cleric, but al-Sadr keeps denying he's responsible. Surely al-Khoei's death deserves justice, but the coalition should have left that to the provisional Iraqi government, once it is in place, to handle.
These are trying times, and certainly the temptation for many Americans is to call on Bush to start pulling out the troops, and pronto.
But no, that's not the right call. What Bush needs to do is make it clear to Americans and the world that the United States won't be bullied, but neither will it act like one. We can never win Iraqi hearts that way.
X Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.