A Nation At War With Itself

Friends,
An answer to a question I had asked earlier. Who are we fighting, today, in Iraq? This is a good synopsis of the absolute chaos in Iraq. Bring our troops home!
Rev O

Washington Post
"Not so in Iraq, where we are now fighting our third distinct enemy. In the war's first phase, we engaged Saddam Hussein's government and, after it fell, pro-Hussein and other Sunni forces that waged a guerrilla war against us. In its second phase, we fought a group that hadn't even existed when the invasion began, al-Qaeda in Iraq. By our own military's admission, al-Qaeda in Iraq was never responsible for more than a small fraction of the violence there, but it was the group most implacably hostile to our soldiers and to much of the civilian population. In this, we were greatly aided by the Sunni forces that had been our main adversaries in the war's first phase but which had come to loathe al-Qaeda. As the Sunni resistance took up arms against al-Qaeda, we reclassified the Sunnis as friends and armed them, though they remained opposed to the Shiite-dominated national government we claim as our primary ally.
Now, according to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress last week, our main adversaries in Iraq are the Shiite forces being aided by Iran, the Shiite power next door."

"Our current policy in Iraq, then, is to defend those Shiite groups aligned with Maliki, their closeness to Iran notwithstanding, against those Shiite groups, also close to Iran, aligned either with Sadr or in any event against Maliki. And just because we're now focusing on enemy No. 3 doesn't mean that enemy No. 1, the Sunni insurgents, won't take the field again against Maliki and our own forces -- only this time, they'll have the arms we gave them to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Enemy No. 3 in Iraq Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Iraq is unlike our previous wars because we are occupying a nation at war with itself.