The Black Hole

For nearly a year now I've been seeing a steady trickle of news articles about the tangle of political and religious grudges in Iraq that appear to be deeply infiltrated into the Iraqi police and security forces. Today I read another one in Newsweek. Here's a snippet:

No one knows how many death squads are currently operating in Iraq, but in the past year hundreds of murdered bodies have been found, many of them with their wrists bound execution style and a single bullet through the head. Some death squads are killing Shiites; others are executing Sunnis. In many cases, witnesses tell of victims being abducted by unidentified men in police uniforms. Almost unnoticed amid the country's chaos, the dirty war is beginning to rival the insurgency in its deadliness and in its damage to national stability.

The administration has avoided discussing this problem for obvious reasons, but it demands serious attention. When I read that US troops are arresting Iraqi cops/deathsquads it sends up a red flag. We seem to be getting pulled deeper into the complicated morass of Iraqi political and social conflicts. It's arguable that we are obligated to do this. Our toppling of the previous regime let this genie out of the bottle. That's fair. But where does it end? Is the American public ready to dive into the challenge of sorting out these deep grudges that exist between the various factions? I don't think we've had this discussion yet, not really, and it's pretty important that we figure out where we want to draw the line here...or if it's even possible to draw that line now. Maybe it isn't.