[Southack]

"Prominently missing from the signers was Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of the most influential Sunni Arab clerics in Iraq, who is said to have close ties to the insurgency."

What the NY Times deliberately omits is that Harith al-Dari is a *foreign* Sunni cleric who only came into Iraq after the U.S. invasion had toppled Hussein.

[gandalftb]

The NYT also just reported the following: Sheik Harith al-Dari said he would continue to view the armed resistance in Iraq as legitimate until the U.S. military offered a timetable for its withdrawal. Al-Dari wants to remake Iraq into the political structure of Saudi Arabia but now finds himself as a big fish in an increasingly smaller and more discredited pond.