Muqtada al Sadr Quotes
The resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. This new group will be defined soon by me.
There was no national uprising. Not a single Cuban came to assist the Bay of Pigs invaders, nor was there even one sabotage action or other revolutionary action anywhere in Cuba. The conviction of the CIA that Castro was hated by the Cubans and the overwhelming majority of Cubans would welcome an invasion was so completely wrong that it was stunning. The assurances the CIA planners had received that there would be an uprising came from Cuban anti-Castro émigrés who were being paid by the CIA to organize the invasion force. They would only continue to get paid if the American authorities felt that there was a very good chance of success so they turned out to have a serious conflict of interest. But the CIA planners had been hearing this from Cuban exiles not involved with the invasion and they had a strong bias that no communist government could be a popular one. It was a great illustration of the fact that experienced professional intelligence analysts and operatives are susceptible to self-delusion and confusing wishful thinking with reality.
Note that he proudly describes himself as a Marxist-Leninist, but distinguishes that from Communism—especially Russian Style communism.
Muqtada al-Sadr is an Iraqi Shia cleric, politician and militia leader. He is the leader of the Sadrist Movement and the leader of the Peace Companies, a Shia militia that is a reformation of the previous militia he led during the American military presence in Iraq, the Mahdi Army. The Jerusalem Post reported on 7 December 2019 that an armed drone attack targeted Sadr.