Iraqi Sectarian Slaughter

This from this week's The New Republic:

I can't even imagine Iraq anymore. It exceeds my capacity to visualize horror. In a recent interview with The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, a woman named Fatima put it this way: "One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing, and one-third of us will be widows." At the Baghdad morgue, they distinguish Shia from Sunnis because the former are beheaded and the latter are killed with power drills. Moqtada Al Sadr has actually grown afraid of his own men. I came of age believing the United States had a mission to stop such evil. And now, not only isn't the United States stopping it--in some important sense, we are its cause.

My emphasis.

In the article, Peter Beinart argues for one last attempt to get control. He argues for threatening to leave the country if peace can't be brokered and increasing troop levels and monetary investments if it is. I guess I could support it but I don't believe it will work. We, and it is we since it was our leaders, screwed this up from the very beginning. Beinart argues we owe them some consideration and I agree. But we need to stop sacrificing American lives to a lost cause.