Bush, McCain, and other supports of "the surge" exhort us to give it time to work. Sure, these things do take time. In the archetypical counterinsurgency campaign, the British government flailed for years, hit on the right formula, and still took several months to put all the pieces together.
Malaya wasn't the most important national security priority for Great Britain. Nor was the political situation the sprawling mess that exists in Iraq today. On the same day that bombings killed 45 Iraqis in Baghdad alone, the Iraqi government continues to sway under the weight of factional infighting, particularly among Shi'ite groups. Moqtada al-Sadr, a cynical man who sees trouble-making as his strongest tool, threatened yet again to leave the government.
Of course, al-Sadr has made this threat before, and he will again. However, this latest political clash among rival Shi'ite factions (in this case, led by al-Sadr and al-Maliki) highlights how little the United States can do to stop the escalating conflicts among and within Iraq's sectarian and clan divisions. Shiites don't trust government intelligence agencies, which were once dominated by Saddam Hussein's Sunni brethren, so they create their own. Shiites don't trust each other, so the Mahdists infiltrate the security forces with their own representatives. And so it goes, as a recently deceased author once said.
Until there's something worth uniting around, the factional conflict will only continue. More Iraqis will die in more attacks. More questions will remain about who was behind today's carnage, and why. Did Sunnis group plant the bomb that killed 47 people in Karbala? Or was a Shi'ite group responsible, for reasons fathomable only among bitter rivals? One of the few certainties is, the United States has very little to offer the combatants, except as a target.
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