It’s a rare story that I don’t want to write about, but six Sunnis burned alive by militant Shiites certainly qualifies. A little emphasis added to the “fun” part:

Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

The savage revenge attack for Thursday’s slaying of 215 people in the Shiite Sadr City slum occurred as members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques, and several homes while killing an unknown number of Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad.

Great way to come back off of that Thanksgiving everything-is-lovely high, no? Now it’s the bolded bit that I think deserves extra attention. See, we’re repeatedly told that the big issue is getting the Iraqis capable of keeping the peace and then we can get outta there. Problem: it doesn’t help if they won’t, even if they can.

This is the state of post-Saddam Iraq. Radicals grab people as they leave worship, and then torch them as the Iraqi soldiers sit by and watch. I want you to imagine this is your life now. Picture reading in the paper that some in your family were killed leaving church and the police just watched as it happened.

And that’s why our current thinking of Iraq is flawed. Bush and his boys have pushed this simplistic view that the Iraqis are a single people. They’ll all love us for taking out Saddam and they’ll all unite and be free, then they’ll all make one united military that will fairly protect the nation as one. Unfortunately, that just ain’t the reality.

The Iraq policy can be best summed up by two words: blind optimism. The thought that everything will just work out fine because our intentions are good. Hopefully with the shuffling around in DC someone will pound it into Dubya’s head that good intentions and noble goals do not a good policy make. Unless we find a way to grapple with the division within Iraq’s borders, there will be no peace.