Their Brilliant Plan to regain control of Iraq started with slaughtering Shia Arabs to provoke the Shias into killing Sunni Arabs in retaliation. With Shias killing Sunni Arabs, the Sunni Arabs would then turn to the insurgents for protection and thus add to insurgent strength.
Of course, the result has been a bit less than the Sunni Arab insurgents hoped for:
A major source of loss for the Sunni Arabs is migration to foreign countries. About 100,000 are fleeing each month, joining nearly two million already in exile. Many Kurds and Shia Arabs make no secret of their desire to drive all Sunni Arabs from Iraq. They are well on their way to achieving this goal, with over a third of the Sunni Arabs gone already. At the current rate of migration, all Sunni Arabs will be gone from Iraq within four years.
The Moslem world as a whole should consider the plight of Iraq's Sunni Arabs when they hear jihadis trying to spark a war of civilizations between the Islamic world and the Western world. It won't end up any better for the Islamic world than it is turning out for the Sunni Arabs of Iraq.
This does not mean I've given up hope that Iraq could settle down into a muti-party democracy. That is because for all the anger of Shias against the Sunni Arabs, many Shias don't have direct experience of the murder campaign the Sunni Arabs are conducting (from the first link to Strategypage):
For all the reports of violence in Iraq, most Iraqis feel safe. That's because, 78 percent of the violence (as measured by armed attacks), take place in Baghdad, Anbar province (west of Baghdad), and the smaller Salah ad Din and Diyala provinces. These four areas contain 37 percent of the population. In the rest of Iraq, containing 63 percent of the population, opinion surveys indicate that 90 percent of the people feel safe.
There is hope for Iraq given the trends of the Sunni Arabs losing strength and the majority of Iraqis having little experience with Sunni Arab violence. It would help a lot if the Sunni Arabs of Iraq would take a clue pill and decide on a course of action that takes away the Shia excuse to wipe them out.
And I have hope for the wider Islamic world, too, if we can help the moderates defeat the jihadis and their enablers.
