Maliki, he's a popular guy

He's almost as loved as the Decider:

He sure will be happy about this:

The U.S. military in Iraq is expanding its efforts to recruit and fund armed Sunni residents as local protection forces in order to improve security and promote reconciliation at the neighborhood level, according to senior U.S. commanders.

I guess the Second Amendment is in force in other countries too. Guns promoting reconciliation? Oh yeah, THAT'S A PLAN!!! When did Wayne LaPierre join the Pentagon?

I know I'm no pompous, always wrong military historian, like various and sundry Kagans; but somehow, when the Sunnis are the primary cause of American soldiers' deaths -- and we are trying to avoid an even worse civil war, arming large groups of one ethnicity just doesn't strike me as the wisest possible fucking course in the world.

But that's just me, the craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy liberal! (throw your hands up in the air when you say that out loud).

I'm sure this will make Maliki hap, hap, happy!

A key aide says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s relations with U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus are so poor the Iraqi leader may ask Washington the withdraw the well-regarded U.S. military leader from duty here.

Meanwhile, the groups we are arming recently threw down the gauntlet (or pretended to throw down, the price of gauntlets is at an all time low -- I cannot even sell my "Gauntlets of Ogre Power" on e-bay):

The Shiite-led Iraqi government issued a sharp response Friday to a Sunni political bloc that is threatening to pull out of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's administration, saying the group's "threatening, pressuring and blackmail" will not impede Iraq's progress.

In a four-page statement, Maliki spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh dismissed each of the 11 demands made by the Iraqi Accordance Front, the country's largest Sunni political group. Dabbagh accused the Accordance Front of working for its own political gains rather than for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Damn, that political progress stemming from the surge is fan-damn-tastic.

I tremble at such awesomeness!

To summarize:

- The Sunnis hate the Shiia government.
- The Sunnis hate the American occupation.
- The Shiia's reject Sunni demands.
- A civil war is going on.
- The Americans give guns to the Sunnis and the Government to the Shiia.


WOW, what could possibly go wrong?