Power shift in Iraq explained by defeat of the Sunni insurgents

The Belmont Club:

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The gassing of the Kurds. The destruction of the southern marshes and their inhabitants. Saddam's persecution of the Shi'a. Even the Iraq-Iran war. All the atrocities the George Galloway's buddy is being tried for were to anyone with the wit to see it part of the civil war that Michael Yon found underway. But with the arrival of the US Saddam and his successors finally found an enemy they could not defeat. And their arrival tipped the scales of war to produce this shift in advantage -- the decline of Sunni power and the ascendancy of Shi'ite factions -- many of more or less equal criminality, that is the underlying reason for the fear now gripping Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad. It was probably why soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister Jaafari's clung so grimly to power. Never had his faction been so close to standing over their foes. The Strategy Page describes the resentment among Shi'ite factions over Jaafari's forced departure.

Yaqubi, Jafari, and others, are increasingly open in their opposition to Coalition efforts to "reach out" to Sunni leadership, and some are openly suggesting it's time American forces leave, a call which radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been making openly for some time.

But as Michael Yon says, America is in Iraq for its own reasons. Saddam was a threat, though we have forgotten that now. To listen to some in the press, everything was better under Saddam. Still, Jafari's interests are not American interests. And since it was American power, not Sadr's pathetic militia that ground down the Sunni forces the way forward must be on American terms, not Jafari's.

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The semantic argument over the "civil war" goes on but the defeat of the Sunnis seems clear.