US making Moqtada al-Sadr more popular....

talk about unintended consequences...

Iraq's rebel cleric gains surge in popularity
By Roula Khalaf in Baghdad
Published: May 19 2004 21:49 | Last Updated: May 19 2004 21:49

An Iraqi poll to be released next week shows a surge in the popularity of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical young Shia cleric fighting coalition forces, and suggests nearly nine out of 10 Iraqis see US troops as occupiers and not liberators or peacekeepers.

The poll was conducted by the one-year-old Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is considered reliable enough for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to have submitted questions to be included in the study.

snip...

Conducted before the Abu Ghraib prisoners' scandal, it also suggests a severe erosion of American credibility even before Iraqis were confronted with images of torture at the hands of US soldiers.

Saadoun Duleimi, head of the centre, said more than half of a representative sample - comprising 1,600 Shia, Sunni Arabs and Kurds polled in all Iraq's main regions - wanted coalition troops to leave Iraq. This compares with about 20 per cent in an October survey. Some 88 per cent of respondents said they now regarded coalition forces in Iraq as occupiers.

more at link

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907692167&p=1012571727085

speech against the IWR). And Fiore has a cartoon:
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/iridol.html
hey, I even found the Fiore cartoon where he quotes Clark on it:
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/dissent.html