A chilling paragraph near the bottom...

Professor Juan Cole is right to focus on Basra and that hectic, violent incident. But my jaw dropped when I read this in the New York Times article that the Professor references:

In a statement on an Internet site on Monday, the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia modified a declaration of war made last week by its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The statement said followers of Mr. Sadr, the Shiite cleric, who has twice ordered his group to fight against American troops, would not be directly attacked.