Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US

The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies

A Good Article Which Sheds Light On Why US Casualties Are Way Down; No it is Not the Surge.

By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent

"As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?......

.....The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars – against the occupation and the government – at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment."....

In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialised......

.....Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year......"

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Unfortunately, and because of the shortsightedness of so many Iraqis, what is happening appears to be a spectacular success of the doctrine of divide and conquer. Instead of all Iraqis fighting the occupier (which they did successfully in 1920), they are taking turns in fighting each other, with full support from the occupier.

First Al-Qaida against the Shiites, next the Sunni resistance against Al-Qaida, next the Ba'th splitting into two camps: one favoring negotiations with the occupier and the second refusing, next the Sunni resistance forgetting about the occupier (and that is why US casualties are way down) and going back to fighting the Shiites. All along the Kurds have been working for the occupier and for Mossad.

The picture, in the short term, is discouraging.