Troubling Words from Iraq

The news of the mosque bombing and its repurcussions is not good. But I find these words especially troubling:

In Baghdad, Shiite boys and men abruptly abandoned classrooms, homes and jobs to muster outside the headquarters of the influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the heart of Sadr City, the slum named for the cleric's father.

"This is a day we will never forget," said Naseer Sabah, 24, who had left his job at a pastry factory without changing clothes to join the black-clad Shiite militia fighters clutching pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenade launchers outside Sadr's headquarters. Thousands converged on the Sadr offices, on foot or in buses and pickup trucks packed with armed men hanging out the windows.

"We await the orders of our preachers," teenagers around Sabah cried.

"We are the soldiers of the clerics," Shiite protesters chanted in Karrada, another of Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods.

Awaiting the orders of our preachers? Soldiers of the clerics? What kind of distorted religious vision is this when clerics, of any religious persuasion, are ordering people to war?