Their were many mixed neighborhoods, marriages and families, and relative peace between the two sides, not only in Iraq but in many Arab countries with sizeable Shia minorities. The current civil war is due entirely to the efforts of outside agitators to provoke it and our inability to either understand what they were doing or to stop them. It is my understanding that the Shia showed great restraint in retaliating against the Sunnis until fairly recently, when they realized the Americans could not protect them. The Sunnis also know that it will get ugly once the Americans leave and they will be faced with a 4-1 minority.

We cannot mount a sucessful counter-terrorism program because we do not understand these ancient divisions, or the mechanisms they have used to keep down conflict in the past. Our enemies are from the neighborhood, they do. Al_Quaeda and foreign intelligence agents exploited the fear of Sunnis at suddenly being thrust into a minority, and hooked up with former Baath party and government goons to start a civil war. No price is too high for them to pay to stop the Bush administration from setting up a prosperous and free (and pro-US!) Iraq.

It might have been possible to prepare contingencies to deal with this from the beginning, or at least as soon as we'd been in theater long enough to see what was going on and the tactics our opponents were using. But we never did and I fear it's too late now. It's almost as if every effort to really understand what was happening and prepare for it realistically was summarily dismissed as an excuse to overly complicate the problem and to do nothing. And any effort to modify tactics and try to come to grips with the changing situation on the ground was rejected as weakness and compromise.