Ezra has been engaging with this Tigerhawk fella recently, and I thought I might comment on his latest post. As he says, it's a good thing that some Iraqi Sunnis are getting angry at al-Qaeda. But it doesn't do a whole lot to solve the biggest problem facing Iraq -- namely, the ethnic hatreds between Sunnis and Shiites. Taking al-Qaeda out of the picture would help a little with this problem, since they're interested in stirring up the conflict as much as possible. But even if you could throw all of al-Qaeda out of Iraq tomorrow, the major factors driving the civil war would still be in place. Matt Yglesias described the basic problem in his excellent post from August 2004:
We've got a Kurdish minority in the north that has fairly liberalviews, some taste for democratic governance, and does not believe inthe goal of a stable Iraqi state. In the center, by contrast, we've gotour Sunnis who do believe in a stable Iraqi state (otherwise they getcut out of the oil) but very strongly oppose the notion of amajoritarian Iraq, as that would lead to Shiite domination. In thesouth are the Shia who, like the Sunnis, support the idea of a stableIraqi state. The Shia seem split between a minority (Sadrists and SCIRIfolk) who believe in clerical rule rather than democracy, and amajority (Sistani's folks and al-Dawa) who would like to create anilliberal, Shia-oriented, majoritarian democracy.
