Iraq Elections May Have Made Things Worse

t r u t h o u t has an article about the "successful" Iraqi elections. "Two weeks of intense insurgent violence have made it crystal clear that Iraq's parliamentary elections, hailed in late January as a triumph for democracy, haven't helped to heal the country's deep divisions. They may have made them worse.
The historic election sheared off a thin facade of wartime national unity and reinforced ethnic and sectarian tensions that have plagued Iraq for centuries. Iraqis immediately began playing the roles the election results delivered to them: victorious Shiite Muslim, assertive Kurd, disaffected Sunni Arab. Within those groups lies a mosaic of other splits, especially between secularists and Islamists vying for Iraq's soul."

This is the civil war that I and others talked about so long ago. The three sides of Iraq. We pit one side against the other. We try to institute policies without realizing that there are three sides. We do not consider differences ...

With our occupation we are seen as foreign colonialists. We are seen as trying to prop up one or two sides against the other. Let's get the U.N. in and the U.S. out. It is a huge mess - we created it - we need the U.N.'s help to clean it up.