MIKE PESCA: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Brooke Gladstone and Bob are away this week. I'm Mike Pesca. Inside Baghdad's heavily fortified International Zone this week, the Iraqi government inched closer to a constitutional democracy, as a political convention settled on the makeup of interim Parliament. Though those negotiations were tense, they were overshadowed by even greater tension in the southern city of Najaf. U.S. and Iraqi forces there faced off against follows of Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr who were holed up in the Imam Ali Shrine, one of Shia Islam's most sacred sites. The news of the fighting was full of ultimatums, tentative truces and aerial bombardment reflecting the general fog of war. While Al-Sadr's tactics are vexing, his motivations are well-known, but still he tends to be treated as an international man of mystery. Here's an AP story from Thursday. "What's clear about radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr is he wants power, U.S. officials say. What's less certain is what he wants to do with that power or how far he'll go to get it. As the U.S. government struggles to understand Al-Sadr and his motives, that uncertainty is complicating efforts to end one of the greatest threats to stability in Iraq." But what's truly puzzling, according to University of Michigan history professor and blogger Juan Cole, is the aura of inscrutability that surrounds Moqtada Al-Sadr.

JUAN COLE: If they're confused, they're not paying attention, in terms of overall questions of what he wants, what he envisages for the future. I think he's been very clear and very consistent. He wants the United States out of Iraq - now - immediately. He considers the country to be occupied. He considers the occupation to be illegitimate. Beyond that, he would like an Islamic state in Iraq, probably somewhat similar to what exists in Iran, but independent of Iran and under Iraqi Shiite control.

MIKE PESCA: So if the government does and should understand what he wants, does the coverage of Moqtada Al-Sadr reflect an understanding on the part of U.S. journalists?

JUAN COLE: On the whole I, I think they probably don't much understand him or where he's coming from. The fact is, most U.S. journalists who are covering Iraq don't know Arabic, many of them don't have long experience in looking at the country, and they don't tend to cover major speeches that people like Moqtada give. For instance, in the middle of August, Moqtada Al-Sadr gave a two hour interview on Al Jazeera, and I didn't see any reporting coming out of that in the western press at all.

MIKE PESCA: And now I'm going to ask you a military question, but it actually leads to a media question, and the question is, in your blog, JuanCole.com, you write that you don't see why the U.S. had to press the issue against Moqtada Al-Sadr and his followers right now.

JUAN COLE: That's correct. In my view, if his militia was a problem, it was a problem out in those Shiite cities -- Kut, Amara, wherever they were. And if they were a problem, then they should have been dealt with there on the streets of Kut. Instead, the Americans in April suddenly announced that they wanted to kill or capture Moqtada Al-Sadr. He had given strict instructions to his people not to tangle with the American troops, and there were no incidents to speak of until April, and before that he was, you know, a relatively minor figure in national terms. But by attempting to kill or capture him, they impelled him to then launch an insurgency, I think to make the point that he wasn't going to go quietly, and then his popularity soared, so that one opinion poll in May found that 68 percent of Iraqis had a favorable opinion of him. And I think it's probably gone up again this month.

MIKE PESCA: Now here is the media question: is the western media, who in Iraq is unsafe, unable to speak the language, unable to defy their protectors, the U.S. military -- are they not sufficiently asking the very question that you are asking -- why go after Moqtada Al-Sadr now?

JUAN COLE: Well, it's the kind of question that is difficult for the press to ask. For one thing, if they did the ask the U.S. officials or the Iraqi interim government, they probably would just get stonewalled. But I would say that there is a tendency in the American press generally to follow the lead of the Bush administration policy spokesperson, and so the Bush administration maintains that Moqtada Al-Sadr is a danger to Iraqi political and civil society and must be dealt with. That tends to then set the tone for the stories that follow, although there are notable exceptions. For instance, this week John Burns and Alex Berenson of the New York Times did an extremely important story on how the fighting began in Najaf. The story they put together is that this was a local initiative by a local Marine commanders and the local U.S.-appointed governor of Najaf, and that it presented the higher-ups with a kind of fait accompli, you know, because then people on up the chain of command would have to say, "Well, okay we're going to pull the Marines back." And that's a difficult thing to do in these kinds of situations. And so then the United States is in a position of assaulting Najaf, which is a holy city to Muslims around the world. I've seen person-on-the-street interviews on Arab satellite television in Egypt, for instance, where people were saying "This is an American attack on Islam."

MIKE PESCA: And is the Arab press or Arab television like Al Jazeera emphasizing this aspect of the fight?

JUAN COLE: Oh, yes. Absolutely. But they don't have to play it up very much, because it's already there in the Arab and Muslim publics. Within Najaf, things look different, you know? The people of Najaf don't like the Mahdi militia. They want to get rid of them. And they may even be grateful to the Marines for this fighting. But the farther away you get from Najaf, even within Iraq, among Shiites, the worse it looks. And then if you get outside Iraq, it looks just completely horrible. So it's a public relations disaster for the United States, no matter how it turns out.

MIKE PESCA: Thank you very much for joining us.

JUAN COLE: You're very welcome.

MIKE PESCA: Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and his blog is JuanCole.com. [MUSIC]