She writes:
Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has again proved that he and his followers hold an important card in Iraq's future.
Their clashes with fellow Shiites also made clear one very stark fact: The attempt to forge a new constitution has deepened Iraq's religious and ethnic divisions, not healed them, as Americans had hoped.
Al-Sadr plays an unusual role in the constitution stalemate. He is Shiite, a fiery preacher and the son of a famous cleric believed murdered by former dictator Saddam Hussein. But in the constitution fight and on other issues, he is allied with Sunni Arab hard-liners.
Both al-Sadr and the Sunnis have strong grassroots appeal among ordinary Iraqis disaffected by the political process.
Her second sentence makes little sense given what she says in the rest of the article. Shiite on Shiite violence is not an expression of ethnic or religious antagonism. However, her last sentence in the quote is perceptive. The issue of grassroots appeal hints at class divisions within Iraq's Shiite population that have generally been overlooked by Western observers and commentators. We tend to place far too much emphasis on ethnic and religious divisions and in the process we help to exacerbate them and by focusing our efforts on religious and ethnic spokesmen we help to institutionalize those divisions.
Read the whole article here.
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