Elmer's Brother

'Red on Red'
Here's an interesting bit of very good news from Iraq, from the New York Times of all places (albeit buried on page 6 of the paper). It turns out the U.S. Marines "have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency." The military calls it "red on red," or enemy-on-enemy, fire:

Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added.

If this is right, it would seem to vindicate both Vice President Cheney's much-maligned view that the indigenous insurgency is in its "final throes" and the "flypaper" theory that liberating Iraq is drawing in terrorists and forcing them to face the U.S. military.