…this one in Mosul. Someone just described Iraq to me as having four wars: Shia v. Shia in the South; U.S. v. al Qaeda in Anbar; Shia v. Sunni in the Shia ethnic cleansing campaign in Baghdad; Sunni extremists v. Shia (and everyone else) in its car-bombing/suicide bombing campaign. The Brits haven’t done a good job establishing control in the south, but that’s a much less urgent concern than the other three fronts. In Anbar, where many of the tribal sheiks love the U.S. Marine Corps (they’re not so high on the Iraqi army), there’s a possibility of real progress. In Baghdad, it appears we already are tamping down the ethnic cleansing, with Sadr ducking and covering. It’s the bombing campaign that we’re going to have a real problem stopping, and as long as it continues, it will erode support for the Iraqi government and the war here at home. Stopping the campaign is an intelligence challenge of the first order, since we need to get inside these networks to shut them down. It would be great if instead of caterwauling about past intelligence failures, the Democrats and everyone else in Washington would apply themselves to helping address this all-important, ongoing intelligence challenge. But I guess that’s not as much fun as dumping on Doug Feith.