As early as March of 2004, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was stoking a enmity among the Sunni and Shia populations in Iraq.

The Guardian noted the same thing in September of 2005 when Zarqawi declared war on the Shia. 

In the spring of 2005, Al Qaida in Iraq several of what Marine Colonel Bob Chase called, "Attempts at the spectacular."

Al Qaida attempted to assault several U.S. military installations.  Attempted being the operative word because AQI fighters never came very close getting inside the wire.

It was shortly after these failed attacks that Strategy Page reported an increase in attacks against Iraqi civilians.

The Brookings Institute's Iraq Index bears out Strategy Page's analysis with a marked and steady increase in bombings begining in the Summer of 2005. 

Zarqawi's tactic of inciting sectarian violence in hopes of sparking a civil war began shortly after the attempts at the spectacular failed and a new strategy was required to hasten the withdrawal of coalition forces.

That it took more than a year for Zarqawi's strategy to come to fruition is not surprising.

For centuries, Shia and Sunni Moslems lived in relative harmony in Tigris and Euphrates river valleys.

Intermarriage was and still is common and many tribes have Sunni and Shia branches.

Sunni on Shia violence and vice versa did not break out immediately after the war and had to be coerced along for a year through bombings, assassinations and murders.

The mayhem carried out not purely from sectarian hatred, but as part of calculated strategy to achieve an objective:  the withdrawal of coaltion forces from Iraq.

Soon, everyone who a stake in the coalition's departure from Iraq was in the game.  Sunni jihadists killed Shia.  Iranian backed Shia militia men killed Sunni.

And the age old Arabian tradition of blood debt, which Gibbon wrote about in Decline and Fall, finally came into play.

"The nice sensibility of honor, which weighs
the insult rather than the injury, sheds its deadly venom on the
quarrels of the Arabs: the honor of their women, and of their
beards, is most easily wounded; an indecent action, a
contemptuous word, can be expiated only by the blood of the
offender...the interest and principal of the bloody
debt are accumulated: the individuals of either family lead a
life of malice and suspicion, and fifty years may sometimes
elapse before the account of vengeance be finally settled."  (Gibbon, chapter 50)

The artificially created civil war is sustained by the blood debt and active agents whose goal is the withdrawal of the coalition and breakup of Iraq into a Shia sattelite state of Iran and a Sunni Caliphate in greater Anbar.  The Kurds already have their own mini-state.

If the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq was merely to end the sectarian violence, following the advice of Raed Jarrar and certain members of Congress.

But ending the sectarian violence is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and the War on Terror.  The goal is to defeat jihadist Islam and install a pro-western government in the heart of dar al islam.

Quite to the contrary of ending sectarian violence, a larger Sunni vs. Shia cold (or at least room temperature) war in dar al islam could be a good thing--and may both sides lose.

Installing a pro-western government in Iraq will require dealing with those who do not want a political solution for  seeking compromise with those who refuse it is a Sisyphean task.

The de-escalation of an artificial civil war requires removing the source of the ill--the jihadist and Iranian elements.  It will not be easy, it will not be done quickly, but Zarqawi's legacy must not be a lasting one, we must not yield to the jihadists their desperate ground.

Support independent reporting and filmmaking from Iraq, buy a DVD. 

---