I would like to point out some myths of Iraq's Sectarian 'crisis', that continue to dominate our foreign policy, both from Congress and this Maladministration, as well as further propagated by our media, I would also include myself in the mix. The first myth is that Sunnis, Shi'a, and Kurds are defacto blocs or sects. The second myth, as premised on the first, is the notion of partitioning them will create peace and stability. What has blindsided Maliki and the Maladministration is the strength of the nationalist movement within Iraq and the rejection of sectarianism, or even tribalism, within many of the diverse entities.

As this article points out...

One of the most destructive qualities of how events in Iraq are framed in the English-language media is the oversimplification of Iraq's political actors into three groups: Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.

Here's a poignant Diary...

...Mohammed is my childhood friend whom I have not seen since the end of 2006, when he was driven out of our area by Shia militants.

Mohammed asked to see me, and I suggested that he come to al-Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad. He refused, instead suggesting we meet in al-Zawra park - not too far from his family’s new home, which is controlled by Sunni militants.

I asked Mohammed during the call whether the park was safe enough for us to meet.

"There is no reason at all to be afraid in this place," he told me.

A few days later, we had an intimate, warm and wonderful meeting. The experience inspired me to write a story about Shia and Sunni friends who meet up in Baghdad. I asked one of the park’s security guards whether there were a lot of get-togethers there. He said there were, and most happened on Fridays.

The next Friday, I went to the park to work on the story. I sat close enough to watch a young man sitting alone. He looked afraid when he glanced at me, and nervously wrung his hands. A few minutes later, his friend walked up and they embraced tightly, their eyes filling with tears.

I decided to talk to them, and it turned out that their situation was similar to that of my friend and me: They were two young men from different sects who had lived together in a mixed Baghdad neighborhood, al-Hurriyah, that has been controlled by Shia militias since late 2006.[...]

When I started talking to a couple of the guys, the rest gathered around us. One, a Shia, told me that his brother and some of his friends were killed by al-Qaeda. The second, a Sunni, said that several of his friends and relatives were killed by Shia militias.

Both seemed hostile to the other sect. After chatting for a while, I asked if either was prepared to kill a member of another sect to exact revenge for the loss of their loved ones.

The two kept silent for a moment, saying they were not murderers. But they said they felt obsessed with feelings of grief and sorrow.

Reidar Visser points out...

The international media, for its part, simply refuses to recognize the existence of the second party in the ongoing two-way struggle. Instead the media read every single move on the Iraqi political scene as part of a "battle" between Iraq's "main contending factions, the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds" -- as seen, for example, in coverage of the law on the powers of governorates, largely presented to American readers as a "Shiite objective" in a grand compromise where the Kurds got "their" budget and the Sunni Arabs "their" amnesty law. The deep intra-Shi'i divisions on the governorates law and the Sadrist demands for a strong amnesty law were conveniently ignored; only the ethno-federalist players were even acknowledged.

Arguably, though, the greatest problem for the Iraqi centrists is what may be termed “Bush’s Biden policy.” While Washington speaks an admirable language of fidelity to strong central government, in practice it consistently extends material and moral support to the opposite camp, the ethno-federalists that share Biden’s vision for Iraq. In 2003, Bremer acceded to Kurdish demands to maintain peshmerga militias; in 2004, the US let the Kurdish parties introduce the fateful concept of “disputed areas” into the Transitional Administrative Law, whereby the old regime’s displacement of individual Iraqis can be redressed by collective demands on territory framed in an ethnic language. Since 2005, when it launched the divisive project of a single sectarian region south of Baghdad, the Supreme Council’s relationship with Washington has prospered. Whenever there is talk in Washington about an alternative to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the discussion tends to focus on the Supreme Council’s man (and the instigator of the presidential veto of the governorates law), ‘Adil ‘Abd al-Mahdi. ‘Abd al-Mahdi’s accession to power would probably mean the evaporation of the last remnants of centralist thinking in the Iraqi government, currently represented by Maliki personally, as well as figures like Oil Minister Husayn al-Shahristani. Conversely, Washington maintains little or no contact with representatives of the centrist trend whose vision for the future is far more compatible with the long-standing stated objective of US policy: a unified, multi-ethnic Iraq.

It is policy contradictions like these that facilitate the persistence of ethno-federalist dominance in Iraq, despite clear signs that this current is losing influence in the Iraqi parliament and among the Iraqi people south of Kurdistan. The ethno-federalists may not enjoy a parliamentary majority, but they have secured control of two of the three seats on the Iraqi presidency council. They cannot dictate the legislative agenda, but have managed to jostle their way to a blocking majority on the committee charged with revising the Iraqi constitution. Today, in a most ironic manner, Iraqi politics has come almost full circle in a gradual liberation from sectarianism: An institution originally designed in 2005 by the ethno-federalists to protect communal interests -- the presidency council -- is now being used by one of the vice presidents, ‘Abd al-Mahdi, to guard his ruling faction against democratic pressures framed in Iraqi nationalist terms, including from a majority within his “own” Shi‘i community. There are signs that at least some groups inside the government have had enough of the centrifugal forces associated with the ethno-federalists, with the Supreme Council’s complaints about the police in Nasiriyya and Basra suggesting that its supposed monopoly on the security forces south of Baghdad is much exaggerated. But until US policymakers realize the growing importance of the centrist trend in Iraq there can be no real alternative US policy: The major “alternatives” to Biden’s ideas on the Democratic side -- withdrawal or a focus on fighting al-Qaeda -- would only mean a freeze of current power structures and an irreversible head start for the axis of the Kurdish parties and the Supreme Council. These parties, notably, have benefited and continue to benefit from a disproportionate share of US spending on supposedly “national” institutions of government, including the arming and training of branches of the country’s security services. In the meantime, those Iraqis trying to push their country’s politics in a more sensible direction will continue to face a formidable opposition, made up of the combined forces of Republicans and Democrats in the United States, Iran and their ethno-federalist Iraqi partners.

Badger(nice to see him back in action!) nails it down...

Overall, the continuation by Maliki of his "enforcing the law" campaigns in cities that are strongholds of political movements that oppose him, and oppose the American occupation (Basra, Sadr City, Mosul, now Amara) clearly represent what you could call a "sectarian" strategy, based on vilification of political enemies as common criminals, and this is obviously a strategy that the Americans have been quite comfortable with. The expectation would be that the groups in question would fight back as groups. But what I think the Sadrists and others recognize is that this would intensify the pattern of sectarian conflict, and because the sectarian approach is no longer broadly acceptable (if it ever was), those fighting in principle as particular groups against the national government, no matter who they are, would eventually lose popular support. Hence the acceptance, in Amara for example, of a national government role in law-enforcement until such time as the sectarian-American nature of Maliki's intervention is demonstrated; and similarly the acceptance of the idea of a broad-movement type of participation in the local elections, as opposed to specific Sadrist-party lists. In each case, it is a question of not taking the sectarian bait, and instead stepping back and responding to sectarian attacks with a nationalist response.

The problem for America is that the part I have italicized above hasn't been understood. America continues to support Maliki in his sectarian attacks on rival groups, attempting to prolong and eventually "win" a sectarian battle where any group opposed to the Maliki-America alliance is eventually attacked with tanks and warplanes. There has grown up in America a whole industry devoted to the issues of "asymmetric warfare" that result from this strategy. But I think it is possible that what they are facing now--whatever the situation may be with the armed resistance groups--includes something quite different, possibly new. The normal routine has been to pick a tribe and then manage the ensuing civil war and eventual elections and so on. In this case there seems to have been a learning curve, but only on the Iraqi side, not the American. America continues to pick its tribe (in this case Maliki and his circle), but the Iraqis are failing to behave as expected: Instead of taking up arms (or even political activity) in a direct confrontation with the Chosen Tribe (and implicitly on behalf of the "other" tribe), the prevailing Iraqi strategy seems to be to deny the paramountcy of any such "tribal" concept. This means that the Maliki-American campaigns--attacks on their rival groups in Basra, Amara and elsewhere--are accepted insofar as they have any bona fide national-government law-enforcement element, and rejected insofar as they go beyond that into collusion with the occupation and sectarian attacks. It is a bit subtle for the likes of the American media and punditry, where it is assumed that the only alternatives are sustained armed resistance on the one hand, or defeat on the other.

It's a shame we're confined to a Black or White perspective...