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politician in the land at present; from the Sunni emerged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born psychopath and sectarian killer who, because of the barbarous force of the assaults he unleashed on the Shia, in turn brought misery to the Sunnis; and there is Moqtada, the canny heir of an influential family who has come to dominate to a great extent the Shia of Iraq - or at least the downtrodden amongst them.
While Talabani is undoubtedly a force for good and al-Zarqawi a force for evil, Moqtada is an enigma. Were one to listen to the UK and US government line, then he is also very much a villain. But Patrick Cockburn's careful inspection reveals a much more complex character.
Among the Sunnis of Iraq and among his Shia rivals, it is common to dismiss Moqtada as a 'zatut' - Iraqi slang for idiot child of the family, a fool who lacks the depth and intellect of his famous father and older brothers. Which is exactly wrong.
Moqtada is in fact a shrewd leader, manipulator and politician with the cunning of
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| Moqtada is an enigma. Were one to listen to the UK and US government line, then he is very much a villain |
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a rat-catcher and the survival instincts of a fox. The great debate in the so-called 'Green Zone' - the area of Baghdad where the Coalition Authority and the Iraqi Government sit; the rest of the country is of course the 'Red Zone' - is to what extent Moqtada is the dupe or puppet of Iran.
On this, Cockburn's book is invaluable: it reveals one of the great fallacies of reactionary Middle Eastern political conspiracy theories and is worth reading it for this reason alone.
Moqtada is in fact the leader of a section of the Iraqi people who were at the bottom of the pile for generations. Now they find themselves at the top of the heap, blinking in the light, and with no idea on earth what to do with the power handed to them by events and by the advent of democracy - the latter the biggest irony of all for the US neo-cons.
Of course there is Iranian influence - how could there not be? The only Shia nation on Earth is Iran. (Shia are a minority in Islam - only nine per cent - and form a tiny proportion of Arab Muslims.) But, as Cockburn makes 
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