Wretchard of Belmont Club wrote yesterday about the orgiastic revelry of Muqtada al-Sadr's followers, placing the phenomenon somewhere between a long-remembered, serendipitous "happening" and a potentially defining cultural movement. Some of his readers pushed further into analogy, likening the blend of fervor and violence to an Islamist Woodstock.

I caution against assigning more significance than is necessary. Western journalists have been giving terrorists subtly favorable press, particularly these sycophantic "day in the life" pieces, since the fall of the Ba'athists last April. Newsweek, firmly left of center, has published its share; the diligent news reader has been subject to dozens of sympathetic portraits of hoodlums in a few months — nearly as much as, if not more than, the Iraqi innocents they victimize. The lure does well to focus attention on a relatively minor, thoroughly simple-minded and totally destructive by-product of subcontracting Iran's foreign subterfuge out to a buffoon and whatever muscle he can round up with promises of action, cash and T.V. time. Strip away the gloss and we're left with barbaric frenzy, which is certainly nothing new. Giving the activities of the Mahdi gangs a capitalized name — something Wretchard's readers, not really Wretchard, are doing — is the intellectual equivalent of closely watching people stumble through and scuffle outside of the doors of a single New York City dive for hours, trying to find another name for carousing.

This is less a unique production than phlegm in a body's expulsion of a virus.

I contend that the absolute shock of change, near-instantaneous on a cultural time scale, helps to explain the temporary disconnection between men and domestic inhumanity. In fact we can find at least an indirect precedent for the bizarre, if not chilling behavior in William Chapman's bookwritten account of Occupied and postwar Japan. The "Hikari Club" was the loan-sharking scheme begun in 1948 by Akitsugu Yamazaki, a Tokyo University law student turned rake. Caught by authorities in 1950, Yamazaki ended his Life of Riley by committing suicide. "Life is a drama," he wrote in his diary. "I write the scenario, produce and direct the play, and act the hero. I bet my life and I do not take death seriously." Chapman goes on in Inventing Japan:

The "Hikari Club Affair" became one of those rare events that symbolizes an entire era. Those who lived through it remember the decade of 1945-55 as much for its atmosphere of moral decadence as for its deprivation and poverty. Yamazaki's exploitation of friends, his crass relations with women, and his celebration of pure avarice served as a metaphor of the times. ...Yamazaki had been no low-life trickster. He was of good family, and as a student at Tokyo University had been prepared for a career of almost certain success and respectability. In the "Hikari Club" he created a model of greed and unrepentance that has stood time's test as the symbol of a mean and shoddy decade.

...In those comfortable [prewar] times, the head of the house could live on credit with obliging tradesmen, paying grocers, druggists, and clothiers once a month. Postwar relations were reduced to cash on a vicious black market. If there was one virtue that the old Japan had exalted above all others it was the of giri, one's sense of duty and obligation towards others. Postwar Japanese believed that giri was tarnished beyond recovery. When they were asked in a 1952 public-opinion survey whether they believed the loss of giri was "a disaster," nearly three out of four said that they did.

There are striking differences. Most of Iraq has yet done well to avoid the pervasive cultural collapse that overcame Japan; we have heard little of an all-encompassing black market and know that we would hear more from the flaw-seeking press if it were worth their time. Instead we have cordoned wells of Khomeinist depravity, currently in Najaf and Sadr City, with gradations of trouble in nearby locales. Muqtada al-Sadr's club is murderous, not mischievous (Japan's Yakuza fought amongst themselves and lacked today's insurgents' firepower). More importantly, the Mahdi gang is organized and paid for by foreign representatives of the old way, the Islamist way. It is an interjection, not a recreation, of authoritarian fanaticism — a bit more like Moscow's Communist infiltration led by Kyuichi Tokuda, although that was largely nonviolent. But like the Japanese example of disorder — a fact poorly reported by the press — these gangs and their work are reviled by most Iraqis, regardless of whether many are too afraid to do anything about it themselves.

And as I said to Wretchard in an e-mail, entropy seems only natural to the post-Saddam explosion of extremism: "I do seem to remember much larger protests in al-Sadr's name last year. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I can't see how many more go-rounds will hold the street's attention when the fun involves such staggering casualties." Cheating death is a thrill for all who follow Muqtada al-Sadr. Running headlong into it, as sure as staying on the tracks will put one in front of the three-thirty freight train, is not for dilettantes, whom it is widely understood make up the bulk of al-Sadr's little "army." That goes further to explain why our forces grind, rather than pile-drive.

This morning, W. Thomas Smith, Jr., gives indications that this is correct and happening before us:

In the end, sacrificing the lives of his Mahdi militiamen will not win Najaf, and al Sadr must also know this. But for a man who has won little respect among Shiite clerics, the battle for Najaf — including the mosque and the cemetery — is a means of garnering an enormous amount of international media attention, and establishing him as something of a cult figure among some Shiites as the man who stood up to America.

Still, months of battling U.S. Army and Marine forces have taken its toll on the Mahdi army. Most of al Sadr's front-line combatants are now dead. His current crop of fighters are mostly disenfranchised, newly recruited youths who are certainly capable of firing off a few rounds or launching a rocket-propelled grenade, but they often break and run when U.S. Marines and Army cavalry troopers move against them.

The past 24 hours have seen U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships pounding Mahdi positions. Fighting continues on the ground in various sectors of the city, and the consensus among U.S. military personnel is that the insurgency is weakening. The latter is due in large measure to an increase in solid intelligence, a more formidable Iraqi national military force, and positive developing relationships between U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. Not good for al Sadr.

Multinational Forces and the Iraqi National Guard are not, I wrote, the Israel Defense Forces. The political engagement of al-Sadr is an awkward Tarantella but while it continues the streets are daily being wiped clean of idiots who try their hand at fighting the best forces in the world. And as has been pointed out many a time, the guerilla aspect of al-Sadr has failed, with little or no sympathy from Iraqis, least of all those in Najaf:

"Two nights ago on a patrol from midnight to 3 A.M., we actually saw Iraqis sitting out on rugs watching and listening to the Coalition aircraft doing their work in the cemetery," 1st Lt. Jeremy T. Sellars — a platoon commander with Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment — told National Review Online on Saturday. "Despite the obvious level of destruction they were inflicting, I watched Iraqis cheer every time the aircraft fired."

No amount of selective interviewing on the part of the morally indefinite mainstream press can obscure how residents, frustrated by the persistent upheaval, choose sides and understand the "violence" not as something that just "breaks out" but something that is directed for gain by the Sadrists and law enforcement by Iraqis and Allies. I have also begun to sense that al-Sadr will be removed and replaced, if not by another iconic leader than by another strategy altogether of Tehran's choosing. One must accept that if Iraqis were both fully confident and tactically capable, a rambler like al-Sadr wouldn't stand a chance.

Inflammations in democratic — or democratizing — societies have been shown to falter when a common good can empower the citizenry and government to shame and prosecute the disruption into virtual nonexistence. Iraq's insurgency is of course paramilitary, so a force of arms is fundamental (to say nothing of the separate insurgency in central Iraq). But the cultural aspect of the Mahdi wave still suffers, as I argued in back in April, a tiny radius.