Iran gets its tentacles slapped away:

Residents of Najaf, Iraq took to the streets Monday calling on radical cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia to leave the holy Shiite city.

Witnesses said protesters chanted anti-Sadr slogans screaming "take your hands off the city, the people of Najaf do not want you."

The protest, the second of its kind in two days, coincided with a meeting in Najaf between Sadr and grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in addition to Najaf's governor Adnan al-Zarfi and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

It's plainly obvious that the window for Islamofascists to culturally destabilize Iraq through the Shiite community has closed. If American forces can keep terrorists' heads down long enough to build an Iraqi force capable of destroying insurgent pockets with little or no help from Multinational Forces, as appears to be the plan, Iraqis will have won themselves a permanent victory, military and societal, for their new country and liberty. As always, they deserve our confidence in their sincerity to build a democratic nation.

Searching for the immediately previous entry, I inevitably read a few others from the same time period and couldn't help but make an observation on a relevant point: leftists, who once "assumed that a dictator would be plucked from Ba'athist remnants and set to watch over the country as oil deposits were bled dry," and accused the Bush administration of lying when it promised to build a democracy, are now telling the world that Iraqi democracy is not worth our trouble. The left's bluff is called.