Muslim Clerics Call For Protests

Despite the rosey look at Iraq that the Bush regime keeps claiming and the uninformed media here keeps pushing at us The Washington Post reports: Two militant Muslim clerics, one Sunni and one Shiite, have called for demonstrations here Saturday to protest the continuing U.S. military occupation of Iraq two years after the toppling of President Saddam Hussein. If the protests materialize, they will be the first large-scale rallies to occur under Iraq's new government, whose most senior leaders -- President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari -- were formally installed this week. Jafari is now forming his cabinet. Moqtada Sadr, a young militant Shiite cleric with a large following in Baghdad's huge Sadr City slum, has urged a peaceful march from Firdaus Square, where U.S. troops tore down a statue of Hussein to mark the capture of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, to the heavily fortified Green Zone. A Sadr spokesman said protesters would demand a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops, the release of detainees in U.S. military prisons and Hussein's prosecution. . . . During communal prayers at Baghdad's Um al-Qura mosque on Friday, a Sunni cleric, Harith Dhari, chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars, urged Sunnis to come out in protest against the U.S. military presence. Dhari maintains that the new Iraqi government is illegitimate because it was elected under military occupation, and he is widely seen as sympathetic to the predominantly Sunni insurgency that targets U.S. forces and Iraqis who work with them. "Tomorrow will be the second black anniversary of the Iraq occupation," he said during the sermon. "We have seen nothing but bloodshed, destruction, pillage and thievery before the very eyes of the Iraqi people, who are looking on as their sons are butchered, detained, and the state funds looted and taken outside the country by the thieves who have taken over. . . . I call on the Iraqi people to wake up from their sleep and to say with one united voice, 'No to occupation!' and to go out tomorrow in demonstrations in all parts of the country -- in Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Dahuk and everywhere." What happened to the warm and welcome and tossing of flowers the U.S. troops were going to get that was promised by Rumsfeld, Cheney and all? Looks to me the only thing being tossed at the troops are bombs. I really don't know how the Bush crime family can sleep at night knowing the havoc they have caused in the quest for more oil and the appeasement of the big business interests profiting from this unnecessary war.