I have to thank Juan Cole for an interesting article. Salon has been bordering on "captain obvious" or "softballs to the angry left" lately and I don't think article is either. Cole does a nice job of laying out a new twist the fog of Iraq. Alright, I'm done with the props and now it's time for a point:

As religious/sectarian leaders have staked out their claims in Iraq they all keep affiliations with the former Iraqi military elite and rank and file. Hundreds of thousands of well trained military personnel were dismissed by the US military because we didn't know what to do with that type of population. Did we think that they'd all go to work as good little capitalists? Or maybe they'd forget to pillage national weapon caches as their ad hoc 401-k? (As if an average person can monitor complex troop movements and create a high yield bomb that can be detonated via cell phone!) In the current situation the disintegration of any sort of cohesive Iraqi society has many root causes, but the gasoline on the fire has been fear and ignored military acumen. Under such conditions can anyone imagine not falling back on their ability to fight as a survival skill? To take this one step further who wouldn't enter the militia tournament for hope at controlling some piece of the nation? These groups will continue to fragment into violent conflict because of the ever-present reminder that the reward for Iraqi weakness is a bound tortured body in the street (or in prison). We all know that the US and religion are not the unifiers; the truly horrifying thing is that when zealotry and brutality equals survival, Iran could be.

I hope Juan Cole will continue to write for Salon, and not regard the comparative dearth of letters as lack of interest. It is my hope that the apparent lack of response is due to readers recognizing how thorny the situation is, and a reflection of people feeling that they lack sufficient background to offer useful commentary.

I'm sure there are losts of internet newsmagazines where, if this article had appeared there, would result in a lot of people writing in to complain that the prof doesn't offer a simple solution to glibly sum things up, regarding what we should do, in a hundred words or so at the end.

It's not enough to believe in God. You have to believe in Allah. It's not enough to believe in Allah; you have to believe in the Shiite interpretation of Allah. It's not enough to believe in the Shiite interpretation of Allah; you have to believe in the *correct* Shiite interpretation of Allah. Or else we shoot you.

See you around the campfire, sharpening the flint spears. If we are all lucky enough to make it.

I don't think you understand, "duderino". In this case we have religious groups vying for power, and you emphasize the adjective, "religious" rather than the direct object, "power." Religious conflicts, eastern or western, aren't necessarily actually about religion, but who gets to rule.

Thinking this HAS to be principally about religion rather than turf is a little like believing that the neocons really care about making the middle east more democratic. If you are an ambitious fellow living in a religious society you might, like Moqtada al-Sadr, decide to go into your dad's line of work, religion, just as an ambitious East German might've chosen to join the communist party circa 1965.

Does anyone think that it might be in the interest of the US (since we live there) to see political power in Iraq move to the followers of a leader, al Sadr, opposed to the influences of Iran?

I must say that I don't understand what's going on in Iran today; I wonder if anyone in the west truly does. Is it a nation state struggling to find its own identity and place in the world? I suspect it feels it knows its identity since it has had four thousand years to understand it. If so, then is it trying to find its place in south Asia? If so can the secular/religious government differences ever be bridged between Iran and the west?

Henry