The 70,000-member police force the US-led coalition has sought hard to promote collapsed in disarray in many parts of the country. Hundreds of police officers and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps quit during the fighting, as barracks and police stations were taken over by militias. Many switched sides and fought US troops.There have been no Jews to speak of in Iraq in this man’s lifetime, yet the Jew nevertheless plays in his mind the traditional role of the malevolent outsider, the usurper, the follower of false authority, the evil force against which petty demagogues and thugs of all stripes can organize their militias. If Jews didn’t exist, the Hitlers, Stalins, and Saddams of the world would have to invent them, as Sadr and his followers, in effect, have in their own context.In Shuala, a Shi’ite suburb of Baghdad that saw fierce fighting between Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, and US troops last week, police officers pulled up to the Sadr office in pickup trucks throughout the day to get instructions from the clerics.
“We are policemen, yes, but also Mahdi. And the Mahdi is stronger,” said Natik Hussein, a 21-year-old policeman busy taping a poster of Sadr to his police truck as his colleagues played with the siren, turning it on and off. “Sadr is the ultimate authority. The Americans are Jews.”
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