in case you had forgotten . . .

IOZ has recapitulated the story of the Iraq war in a single blog post. It's worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

Now the Americans are largely incapable of telling a Sunni from a Shi'ite from a Maharashtran Hindu from an Ecuadorian day-laborer toiling away under the heavenly aegis of the Holy Mother and the many candle-bearing saints. Iraqis, meanwhile, appear to be able to tell each other apart, and so, among a thousand other reasons for the parties to the Iraqi "government" not to agree on anything, not the least of which is the fact that they are powerless agents of a government with no force monopoly who may as well use their sinecures to save up in case they have to flee for an expatriate's life in London, there is the fact that the Shi'ite majority seems to remember that these were the very fuckers who were trying to bring them down in the first place, and are therefore understandably skeptical about inviting them into the henhouse for a chat.