Juan Cole , in noting the bombing of the headquarters of the paramilitary Badr Brigade in Baghdad, the militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had this to say this morning …

The American-appointed Interim Governing Council recently announced that a special "counter-terrorism" unit will be created that will draw for personnel on private militias like the Badr Corps.

Since the militias are overwhelmingly Shiite and Kurd, and the resistance is largely Sunni Arab, this was an announcement that the former were going to be used to hunt down the resisters among the latter.

I can see how enticing this might be to the U.S. Military folk in Iraq … let the different factions fight each other and maybe will lose fewer of 'our boys.' But in the long run, does this solve the problem of creating a functioning, democratic Iraq all chummy with the U.S.? That is what they went in there to do, right (now that we've conveniently forgotten all this silly weapons of mass destruction stuff)? Doesn't this sound more like the perfect recipe to further destabilize the country and create conditions for civil war?