Frank Rich: Forces that killed Sheehan's son now in control of Iraq

The day after Casey Sheehan's slaughter, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the American occupation, presided over a Green Zone news conference promising al-Sadr's woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant for his likely role in the earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam. Today al-Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament, four government ministries, and death squads (aka militias) more powerful than the nominal Iraqi army. He is the puppetmaster who really controls Nouri al-Maliki -- the Iraqi prime minister embraced by Bush -- even to the point of inducing al-Maliki to shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City in the fall. (And, you might ask, whatever happened to Senor? He's a Fox News talking head calling for a "surge" of American troops to clean up the botch he and his cohort left behind.) Only Joseph Heller could find the gallows humor in a moral disaster of these proportions.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Frank_Rich_Forces_in_control_of_0106.html