From an interview with Prospect magazine foreign editor Bartle Breese Bull (who wrote a June opinion piece on Moktada al-Sadr for The New York Times) by Robin Young, host of WBUR’s Here & Now (this segment begins at 4:39 in the Real Audio stream):
ROBIN YOUNG: You do say he’s smart. You say, in fact, he’s one of the canniest politicians in Iraq, but previously we’ve heard that he wasn’t that bright. In fact, that maybe he was maybe kind of dumb and had sort of inherited inherited this mantle from fathers (sic) and uncles but didn’t deserve it.
BARTLE BREESE BULL: Yeah. You know, I think he seems very dumb too and when he speaks and so on. He’s not a great speaker. He’s at the very lowest rung of the Shiite clerical heirarchy — the equivalent of a village preacher, officially — but we have to look at his actions, Robin.
Perhaps she was thinking of a different leader.
