Still, there are pretty “clear” lines of Al Qaeda types — groups that have been repeatedly attacked even by the Sunni tribes when they went too far in their destruction — and the political oriented tribal Sunnis that have focused mainly on attacking our troops to get us to leave and fear Shia dominance.

However, while listening to a few news reports over the weekend I started to see a shimmer of hope. There seems to finally be a more large scale effort to both intermix the Iraqi army troops with both sunni and shia within the same unit, and to force them to interact with American troops more often. There is a chance, albeit a small one, for a new form of Iraqi leader to be forged in such an environment who can both see past the sectarian divide to the wisdom of the rule of law, and potentially have the power within the country to do something about it.

I’m not exactly hopeful yet, but I also don’t think we should pull out immediately either.

All the more reason not to be there other than to protect refugees and to battle al Qaeda and other terrorist elements.

Since al-Qaeda is dominated by Sunnis, how do you propose to do this without being implicated in sectarianism?

I don’t think that your “stay there, but only to fight al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements” plan draws a sustainable line. Who exactly the “terrorist elements” are depends on your point of view. Inevitably, sectarian biases will influence those labels. And the intermixing of different types of groups means that the U.S. often does not know exactly which groups are implicated in a particular action or a particular raid.

I’m sympathetic to the notion that the U.S. needs to start limiting its range of missions in Iraq to avoid getting drawn deeper into a confused and complicated set of overlapping conflicts in Iraq. But I don’t think that it is possible to separate out al-Qaeda as a distinct entity in Iraq. It is like trying to find the eggs in the completed cake.