My first reaction is that I can't believe the CPA would be so stupid to do this. Then I remember who we are dealing with. We are screwed. Here is the entire post from Juan Cole.

Arrest Warrant for Muqtada al-Sadr

Dan Senor in a briefing in Baghdad on Monday revealed that an arrest warrant had been issued months ago "by an Iraqi judge" and implied that it would now be served. US television cable news is doing its best to obscure the real issues here. 1. They keep asking where Muqtada is and calling him a "fugitive." Muqtada announced that he is in his father's mosque in Kufa, and there is no reason to doubt this. He hasn't fled and his whereabouts are well known. 2. Talking heads both from Iraq and from the ranks of the US retired officers keep attempting to maintain that Muqtada's movement is small and marginal. One speaker claimed that Muqtada has only 10,000 men. In fact that is the size of his formal militia. Muqtada's movement is like the layers of an onion. You have 10,000 militiamen. But then you have tens of thousands of cadres able to mobilize neighborhoods. Then you have hundreds of thousands of Sadrists, followers of Muqtada and other heirs of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Then you have maybe 5 million Shiite theocrats who sympathize with Muqtada's goals and rhetoric, about a third of the Shiite community. The Sadrists will now try to shift everything so that the 5 million become followers, the hundreds of thousands become cadres, and the tens of thousands become militiamen. 3. That an "Iraqi judge" issued a warrant is just misdirection. The Coalition Provisional Authority appointed the judges, who are not independent actors. The CPA clearly decided if and when such a warrant would actually be used. For some reason the CPA decided to move against Muqtada on Saturday, provoking his reaction. Since we now know there was a warrant for his arrest, it is not even clear that it was an over-reaction. If the CPA was going to arrest him and execute him for murder, what would he have to lose by demonstrating that he would not go quietly? Journalists kept asking me today why Muqtada chose to act now, why he didn't just wait for the Americans to leave. The answer is that the CPA had clearly targetted him, and forced his hand.

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Cleric: Iraq's Sadr Turns Down Elders' Peace Appeal

Radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has turned down an appeal by Iraq's powerful Shi'ite Muslim establishment to renounce violence, a leading cleric said Monday.

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Here is a comment from Sean-Paul, at The Agonist, that puts this uprising in perspective.

"If the brewing unrest gets out of hand, it could derail the planned transfer of sovereignty on June 30, but more importantly, it could make the U.S. position in Iraq untenable. Coalition forces cannot simultaneously deal with the Sunni insurgency and a Shiite uprising." via Stratfor Chew on that for a while. If, and it is still an if at this point, the Shi'ites do rise up, Operation Iraqi Freedom becomes completely untenable. Our entire position in the Middle East gets rolled up because there is no objective way our military can deal with it. How is the Bush Administration going to respond to that? You think politics are nasty now in Washington. Just wait. This ain't over yet.