Quick, perhaps you’re too quick to be impressed. Your not uncommon “impression” needs some more work before it will qualify as accurate analysis. Iran/AQI link has been reported variously by English language media and officials for several weeks, Sadr is just an echo of already public discourse. Furthermore, there’s history to consider. AQ and Iran have worked out “mutual interest” deals concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan, some AQ are reported in hiding or “protective custody” in Iran since 2002, and there is plenty of evidence that AQ and Saddam had, at minimum, made a non-aggression pact dating back to mid-1990′s, when OBL was resident in Sudan. Alliance of convenience and political expediency between Iran and AQ (and AQI)is just more same old, same old. The new ingredient is the info war Iran and AQ have unleashed on the “enemy’s” public as part and parcel of sowing strategic confusion and chaos in the liberal democracies opposing them. As for the eventual settling of their “internal differences”, the Shia Mahdists and the Sunni Salafists have ideological convictions to support the assumption of inevitability of their own triumph over all infidels and apostates – including the apostates and heretics of their opposite Islamist persuasion. “Inshallah” means a lot more than que sera, sera.
