I notice that Greenwald doesn’t mention when many of these clerics saw their political power increase. But I’m not at all surprised to see Iraqis who may have liked radical Islam in the abstract, when it mainly entailed fulminations against the “great Satan,” reject it in practice, once they were being subjected to its repression and violence. People don’t like to have their fingers cut off or their families terrorized. And that of course is what the radical clerics and their militant followers have to offer, which believe it or not actually does make them worse than socially conservative Republicans.
