Which is it?
If the latter, will it make him less dangerous, or more?
My WAG: No, he is not in flight, at least not significantly beyond the usual extent of his weavings and dodgings to stay a few steps ahead of various assassins and security forces. He might be chilling over in Qom at the moment—according to the OP’s link, he often ducks out of sight for a few weeks or months at a time—but no way is he dropping out of the Iraq power struggle.
Who fuckin’ knows? Any source of fact we may have is filtered through so many agendas, the most educated guess is nothing more than a guess.
So, my WAG? The Shia extremists are playing possum, making themselves scarce so that American attention and firepower is focused on their Sunni counterparts. Infidels killing heretics, what’s not to love?
al Sadr may be on his way out, his rep as stridently anti-American may have outlived his usefulness. The Shia have to be pretty sure they are in the drivers seat, all they need do is wait. If Iraq is a parliamentary democracy, they win. If it is a civil war, they win. So long as American attention is focused on the Sunni insurgency, they can easily afford to shrug it off. So they have just about zero motivation to tangle with Americans.
As well, if armed Shia militia are staying out of sight, they are not wandering about scaring off Sunni who might be inclined to take a shot at Muktada, so best to hide him away for the time being.
On the other hand, who fuckin’ knows?
This, from the cited story, is priceless:
Well that’s the rub. The notionally sovereign govt of Iraq is very friendly with Iran. It was always going to be. Same flavour of Islam, long-standing political ties through exile etc etc.
That’s why all this talk of Iran arming the Sunni insurgency is nonsense. They support the government. It is going to be their friend once the infidels piss off.
Now the USA is caught in a cleft stick. Democracy means a shia axis in the Middle East sitting on all that lovely oil. The only way out of that is to have another Saddam type friendly strongman and arm him to the teeth against his own people.
Attempts to manipulate the composition of the govt after troop withdrawal to exclude Iran-friendly politicians is futile so long as there are elections.
And this was predictable from the get-go, except to neo-cons and their laughable fantasy of an Israel-friendly gratefully subservient Iraq ally.
And that’s been public knowledge for years - that the Iraqi Shi’ite group with the closest ties to Iran was SCIRI, the one we’re cozying up to now because we don’t like Moqtada.
Bush keeps on imagining that there’s somebody whose side we can take in Arab Iraq, but there isn’t anybody who’s all that great. There are no moderates to speak of, and all the people we thought would be the backbone of the new Iraq have left the country or are trying to. That includes most of the parliament: according to news reports, most of them spend most of their time in London and other foreign locales, because Iraq’s too freakin’ dangerous.
Bush’s problem is that he appears too dim to realise there is no-one whatsoever who is on our side. Just various factions whose interests might temporarily coincide and whose friendship lasts just long enough for them to get our money and get us to do some dirty work for them.
Ah, but that’s the plan, don’t you see? Maneuver things so that all Shi’ite Muslims unite in a single bloc, and then all Sunni Muslims nations will form a bloc in response, and they’ll spend the next decade killing each other off and then the U.S. oil companies can move in and resume drilling and pumping in an uninhabited desert!
Those fiendishly clever neocons! 