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Vali Nasr, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Fellow at the Dubai Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, provides the context necessary to understand the so-called "surge" everyone seems to be talking about:

New troops will be in Iraq not to police the streets and hold the line against the creeping violence, but to expand the war by taking on the Shia militias. This is an escalation strategy. Will it work; maybe, maybe not. But it runs the risk that it may very well provoke a Shia insurgency—something Iraq has not so far witnessed. Thus far the U.S. has faced a Sunni insurgency (which by most estimates continues to account for 80% of U.S. casualties), and sectarian violence in which Shias and Sunnis are killing each other. Shia militias are violent, destructive and radical, but Shia militias are a very different problem from the Sunni insurgency. Shia militias, unlike te insurgency, are not targeting American troops. But it looks like the administration is set to change that. Over the past year Washington and its Baghdad embassy have alienated the Shia and undermined the authority of the more moderate Ayatollah Sistani. Anti-Americanism has grown in Shia ranks as they accuse U.S. of favoring Sunnis by focusing on Shia militias rather than Sunni insurgency. By going to war with the increasingly popular Sadr Washington runs the danger of losing the Shia altogether.

Wrong-headed military and political steps provoked the Sunni insurgency in 2003-04, and then more mistakes helped fuel sectarian violence in 2005-06. Another set of mistakes can turn 2007 into the year that U.S. provoked a Shia insurgency. That may prove to be the mother of all mistakes. Hell in Iraq will come when the Shia south—accounting for 60% of the country’s population, largest urban areas, oil, supply lines to Kuwait, and only gateway to the Persian Gulf—rises up against the U.S. Then we either have to get out of Iraq altogether and very quickly, or we will have to commit to many more troop surges to deal with the problems created by the first one.

If we go to war with Sadr, we lose. Maybe not militarily, but that's not what really matters. Politically, we lose. We will create a new anti-western hero, one who will finalyl live up to his family's name.

For god's sake people, please... We cannot unify a people that do not want to be unified. We cannot force them to accept our idea of what is best for them. And killing more of them isn't going to make things better.

Yes, leaving Iraq as a failed state could have disastrous consequences. But that doesn't mean that there is now any way to prevent it from happening. Mistakes have consequences, and sometimes they can be quite bad. These are all things that should have been considered years ago.

just because we want this story to have a happy ending does not mean it will. Just because we believe our own myths does not mean they are true. How many more people will needlessly die before we come to grips with what we have done, both to ourselves and to Iraq?