Preoccupied.

The author discusses the threat to stability in Iraq posed by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, and calls upon the Coalition Provisional Authority to stop Sadr and his followers before they became even more dangerous. The Shia uprising is the disastrous result of a year of miscalculations by L. Paul Bremer and his associates. Isolated in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and ill-informed about Sadr's military muscle, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was essentially presented with two options in dealing with the upstart cleric. One course was to try to bring the cleric into the fold of the occupation. The other was to crack down hard on the cleric and his supporters early on, trying to silence Sadr before his support swelled. Unfortunately, the CPA did neither. Little known to Iraqis when the war began, he burst into prominence immediately after the 101st Airborne Division stormed into Najaf in April 2003; Sadr unleashed a series of fiery speeches against the U.S. occupation from his late father's mosque in Kufa. Then came the killing of Khoie. After Khoie's murder, senior CPA officials, who rarely left central Baghdad, had little sense of how strong Sadr's following was. Even as Sadr's brigades were becoming a serious threat to stability, the CPA did little to equip or train the Iraqi security forces that might have helped stop his army, especially in the Shia south.