Read the Big Iraqi Picture
Michael Shaw

What we see here is an thoroughly artful image of one of those Sadrist "Death to the U.S." demonstrations, the boy literally in the face of the American audience. The text -- "The Last Battle" -- activates a sense of an ultimate confrontation, but misleads one to think it's between the Mahdi and the Americans as opposed to the Shiites and the Shiites. (The nuance-killing caption reads: "An anti-American protest by Iraqi Shiites in Sadr City last month.") Even more misleading, though, is the sense that, after seven years of war, finality in any form is coming to this battered country.
But even that degree of misdirection and reductionism is trifling in light of Wednesday's parliamentary disaster.
Far from failing to honestly represent the Shiite-Shiite conflict, this cover misses the larger picture by kilometers. It's not just that the cover shills for the Bush and the authoritarian Maliki Administration and the McCain campaign by, one more time, laying blame at the feet (and umbrellas) of the Mahdi. It's that it completely negates the complexity of: the central government's lack-of-a-battle with the Kurds, who have largely broken away; the brewing re-run with the Sunnis, who see the "make nice" money running out at the same time the prospects for representation are slipping away; and a Shiite core meltdown, based on the fraying disposition of all manner of Shiite have-nots, who aren't getting any.
Okay, now back to Paris, Britney, the floor exercises and synchronized swimming.
(image: Benjamin Lowy/VII for The New York Times)