t did, shows, yet again, its imperial arrogance as well as ignorance of the history and culture of a nation it's trying to subdue mostly with brute force.

Would America have dared turn the Vatican or the Wailing Wall into a war zone, regardless of circumstance? That is the issue, not who started the battle at the Imam Ali Mosque, and who won how many metres when.

It is the holiest shrine to the world's 120 million Shiites, being the burial place of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Shiite imam.

In treating the siege as another skirmish in an uneasy occupation, Washington and the media have missed the signficance of what has transpired.

The siege angered even the majority Sunnis among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. Many issued anguished pleas for international intervention.

Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis closed ranks. Among the 10,000 people who came to Najaf bearing food and medicine or offering to join the battle, were Sunnis from Fallujah — themselves survivors of an ill-advised U.S. onslaught in spring.

It does not really matter that U.S. Marines avoided directly hitting the shrine. Or, that in case of a showdown, it would be Iraqi, not American, troops who would storm in. Or that Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, not Bush, has been calling the shots, even if that were believable.

The real news is that America thought nothing of violating the sanctity of a sacred Muslim site.

Gunfire punctured holes in the shrine's famous gold dome. Its serene marble courtyard, lately littered with shrapnel, has been echoing to the sounds of gunfire, not the Qu'ran.

American bombers, helicopter gunships, tanks, armoured vehicles and heavy machine guns have been pounding the adjoining historic old city, damaging pilgrim hotels and guesthouses.

The neighbourhood, alive for centuries with the visiting faithful, has been ordered emptied and turned into a ghost town. No one knows how many civilians have been killed or injured.

Americans have desecrated the adjacent Valley of Peace cemetery, which Shiites believe belonged to Abraham and his son Isaac. Soldiers have been stomping on graves, overturning tombstones and pictures of the dead atop the crypts — a travesty in any culture.

So, there was a method to al-Sadr's madness in choosing this venue. Iraqis do blame him for it. But they blame the Americans and their puppet government in Baghdad even more.

Al-Sadr is an ill-educated and dangerous maverick whose political ascendance began the day the Americans closed his weekly paper in April. That led to protests in his stronghold of Al-Sadr City, a poor Baghdad suburb of 2 million, named after his father, Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr, murdered in 1999 on the orders of Saddam Hussein.

The young al-Sadr has since parlayed his victimhood into the role of a fearless leader of an uprising against an unpopular occupation. He has done so with a keen sense of religious and nationalist symbolism.

His Mahdi army is named after the 12th Shiite imam, said to be in occultation until his re-emergence as the mahdi (messiah).

When al-Sadr began his rebellion back in April, he opted for Najaf's sister town of Kufa, where Imam Ali was assassinated in 661 A.D.

He later moved to Najaf, where an ancestor, Sayyid Mohammed Sadr, led an insurrection in 1921 against the British, then the occupying force.

In dealing with the young al-Sadr, the Americans started off talking tough. They would "capture or kill him" and "disarm and eliminate his militia." They did neither, settling instead for an uneasy truce, not unlike what they had done in Fallujah. When the current round began Aug. 5, al-Sadr was back in the Imam Ali shrine, a crusader battling the new Crusaders:

"We will remain here defending the holy shrine until victory or martyrdom." "We will fight to the last drop of our blood." "I am an enemy of America and America is my enemy until the last day of judgment."

His supporters staged rebellions in a dozen cities. An oil field was set ablaze, sending the price of crude to record highs.

In Baghdad, the Najaf crisis dominated a 1,100-delegate gathering called to choose a 100-member interim national assembly. Delegates sent a team — led by an al-Sadr cousin, Hussein — to negotiate peace. He refused to meet them, perhaps his only political miscalculation, in that it allowed Allawi to take the fight to him inside the mosque.

Al-Sadr may yet be saved by, of all people, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior-most cleric, who has been unhappy with his tactics.

Sistani is a "quietist" who shuns politics and speaks elliptically. He has been criticized for failing to condemn the U.S. military attack. Returning yesterday from London after heart surgery, he is to lead a peace march in Najaf today to help find a face-saving exit for both sides.

If he fails, al-Sadr may yet be killed. Should that happen, he will live on to inspire others. If he isn't, he will not disband his militia, regardless of what he promises. It will just melt back into whence it came — the poor, angry and unemployed population — and re-emerge whenever the next call comes.

Regardless of how this battle ends, America has already lost the war.

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