That's pretty obvious now, but to be fair, it may not have been so cut and dry a few years ago. We felt we were fighting a primarily Sunni insurgency, a Sunni Al-Quaeda and a Sunni minority, and the Sunnis were blowing up Shia mosques. It may not have seemed a good idea to pick a fight with a majority who were our natural allies in that struggle, not to mention the political constituency of a government we were trying to encourage. Going after Sadr now may still be the right thing to do, or it may be too late, but we won't know until events play out. And it will all depend on how thoroughly we understand events on the ground now, and how our trying to influence them is likely to work out.

This is what is meant by political warfare, and we've never been very good at it because we've never lived in a cultural shatterbelt like the mideast (or for that matter, Europe!). It's the difference between winning a knife-fight with a single opponent and surviving a free-for-all brawl in bar. It takes different types of martial arts and different instincts. I don't know about Sieff's background or previous articles or his ideological positions, but I feel this analysis posted here is sound, and it would be a mistake to ignore it, even if it is proven incorrect in some of its speculations. His primary subtext, that we are still fairly ignorant of "the situation on the ground" and that our strategies are often based on our misconceptions of it and of wishful thinking has been obvious to me from the start, even when I supported the war. I hope it is also clear that this analysis is independent of whether or not one feels the war was justified in the first place or not.