It might seem that the dust had hardly settled on the tracks of the last U.S. convoy that rolled out of Iraq on Saturday before Shi’ite and Sunni politicians were at one another’s throats. That would be a misleading impression, of course, but only because it presupposes — mistakenly — that the ethnic and sectarian factions competing for power in Iraq had achieved some sort of consensus during the almost nine years that U.S. troops had been present. On the contrary, all the major Iraqi factions have simply used the nine-year presence of the world’s largest army to better position themselves for the next phase of a power struggle that had raged on even as the U.S. had 140,000 troops in the country.
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