All through late 2003 and 2004, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
et. al. were focused on stopping what they thought was a singular problem in Iraq -- a Sunni insurgency composed of Baathist "dead enders," that, once defeated, would allow Iraq to become a safe utopian democracy.
Unfortunately, however, the Bushites fundamentally misunderstood the facts on the ground. There wasn't a one-sided Sunni insurgency. Instead, there was a growing sectarian power grab by both Sunnis and Shiites alike. Because of this fundamental misconception, the Bush administration did NOTHING to stop the emergence of a growing cadre of Shiite death squad style militias, which, as Knight Ridder reports, is now the number one threat to stability in Iraq:
U.S. officials were warned for more than two years that Shiite Muslim militias were infiltrating Iraq's security forces and taking control of neighborhoods, but they failed to take action to counteract it, Iraqi and American officials said.
Now American officials call the militias the primary security concern in Iraq, blaming them for more civilian deaths than the Sunni Muslim-based insurgency and demanding that the Iraqi government move quickly to stem their influence.
U.S. officials concede that they didn't act, in part because they were focused on fighting the Sunni-dominated insurgency and on recruiting and training Iraqi security forces.
"Last year, as we worked through the problem set, that (militias) wasn't a problem set we focused on," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top American military spokesman, said at a recent news briefing.
U.S. inaction gave the militias, with support from Iran, time to become a major force inside and outside the Iraqi government, and American officials acknowledge that dislodging them now would be difficult.
Read the whole thing. It is yet another indictment of Bush administration incompetence. The failure to understand the Shiite threat to the stability of Iraq is the primary reason that we now have a de facto civil war in Iraq -- with both the Shiites and the Sunnis trying to obtain power through violence, rather than through the political process.