Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> The timing may have been designed to coincide with the Syrian foreign
> minister's visit to Baghdad and Tehran's invitation to Iraqi and
> Syrian Presidents to hold a three-way summit (the smart Islamists of
> Iran figure they can use preemptive diplomacy). The Sunni jihadists
> of the al-Qaeda tendency hate Syria (whose power elite are Alawi, a
> kind of Shia) and Iran as well as the Shi'is in general.
On the basis of my earlier remark about focusing on a few wandering molecules in the midst of a volcanic eruption, I'm not sure you should indulge Doug in these deliberately distracting questions. There will be a continuous flow of outrages in Iraq, both for reasons you have analyzed and for the general point Bernard Fall made about resistance movements: they ALWAYS kill far more of their fellow citizens than they do of the enemy, and to make an analytic point of such occurrences is either real historical ignorance or deliberate obfustication. If you try to research every one of such you will have time for nothing else.
Carrol