From The Asia Times
By Gareth Porter

The year 2006 saw the emergence of a sectarian civil war in Iraq and much more open Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in the Middle East. Sunni regimes in the region expressed acute anxiety both about the possibility of the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq spreading to their own countries and about the growth of Iranian influence.

In that setting, the most striking thing about the George W Bush administration’s policy in 2006 was its inability to identify the primary enemy in Iraq.

Is it al-Qaeda in Iraq? President Bush often implies that it is the real enemy, suggesting that the US must fight the enemy in Iraq so it doesn’t have to fight them at home.

Is it the armed Sunni resistance groups, who were the original target of a US counterinsurgency war that is now an all but officially admitted failure?

Or is it the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which has been implicated in large-scale killings of Sunnis in the Baghdad area and which is aligned with Iran in the conflict between Washington and Tehran?

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