Cue to Foreshadowing Theme Music...aka...Meanwhile in Iraq The pebbles of the Middle East are essentially large boulders tossed into a kiddie pool. The surely dashing and debonair academic Juan Cole is one of the best sources on the internet about what is happening in the Middle East, in particular Iraq. I guess that might be expected of a gentlemen that has a doctorate in history and specializes in the area. Note, to President Bush -- a person intimately familiar with the Middle East might be a far sight better to listen to than a person who is an academic specializing in Soviet studies. I don't want to name names, but she doesn't appear to be testifying this week in public. Cole links to this story about the affect of the assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin on the real leader of Iraq Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, a man of lengthy title and substantial influence. Sistani has been pretty much the toreador in Iraq for the last ten months, with the American press only occasionally touching upon him. Sistani, who does a MEAN impression of Saruman from the Lord of the Rings movies (see here:) flexed some muscle's last month in delaying the provisional Constitution, before allowing it to be signed and calling it a nothing that can be ignored later. Yesterday, he proclaimed that the UN should reject the proposed Constitutional framework submitted by the United States. And now? Will this isn't good: "We call upon the sons of the Arab and Islamic nations to close ranks, unite and work hard for the liberation of the usurped land and restore rights," Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement released by his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. "This morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar martyr Ahmed Yassin," the statement said. Story here This is not the kind of news you want when your soldiers are already daily targets and dying at a rate exceeding three every two days. As Cole goes on to state: Sistani is a man who can at will put hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Iraqis into the streets of Baghdad and Basra, posing a severe threat to US and UK troops and officials. And Sharon has managed to enrage him. The harbinger of pending "civil war" hangs over Iraq and it won't be pretty for the Bush Administration -- or for our country. Let's hope it doesn't happen.