Eli Lake, just back from Baghdad, reports:

The U.S. is reaching out to followers of a key Shi’ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia once battled U.S. troops and who remains a powerful leader, particularly among Iraq’s urban poor.

A top Sadrist political leader in Baghdad, Qusay al-Suhail, told The Washington Times that he and his colleagues have been approached five times in the last five months by emissaries seeking to arrange meetings with senior U.S. military and civilian officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

“Yes, the Americans tried to talk to me and other Sadrists several times,” Mr. al-Suhail said. “They try to talk to us as individuals, but we made it clear that there is no use to talking to us when you are an occupying power.”

Prediction: no one who would have argued feverishly about the implications of such a move, pro or con, between 2004 and 2008 will give a shit. But as someone who was pretty relentlessly attacked as an appeaser for arguing during that time that the U.S. needed to find a modus vivendi with Sadr, I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate that this is the wise and sensible thing to do, since even a diminished Sadr is a political force, however demagogic and illiberal, that has to be recognized.

But now U.S. political discourse has moved on so completely to Afghanistan that I’m going to be denied my rightful status as a visionary and a prophet. Whatever. Peace be upon me.