defeat

Patrick Cockburn's Muqtada, an account of the life and ascent of Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr, is published by Scribner.

Four years ago last week, the subcommander of an armed faction in Iraq appeared in a grainy video -- shot somewhere in Baghdad and distributed to Western journalists -- and vowed to kill the leader of a rival group. Today that subcommander is alive but forgotten, and his rival, Muqtada al-Sadr, is one of the most powerful figures in the country. The forgotten subcommander, of course, is Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the three-star whose command of Coalition forces in Iraq lasted a scant two months after he issued the kill order on Sadr. The contrast between Sadr's massive public rallies and Sanchez's furtive low-fi video should have given a clue as to how high young Sadr would rise.

Even with the Democratic Party locked in a fierce civil war, John McCain still hasn't pulled ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in national polls.

The Democratic primary campaign - divisive, bitter, and seemingly endless - has made many Republicans optimistic about their party's prospects for retaining the White House this November. But the numbers still seem to tell a different story -- and not just secondary indicators like the enormous gap between McCain's fundraising and the dollars his Democratic rivals are raking in, or the underlying economic realities that will make this a tough year for the GOP no matter what. The polls themselves aren't running McCain's way, or at least not to the extent that would justify the current wave of conservative optimism about November.