turn them and get them to support the government in the baghdad. so that is proving much more problematic right now. and many of those sunni sheikhs are really afraid to strike out against the al qaeda elements. so it s very discouraging news for people who have worked so hard to try to stabilize that country and certainly i think dangerous. chris, you re talking about sunni militants. they re angry the way they re being treated by the shiite government of nuri al malakar. and now they re an ined with al qaeda. how do you stop something like that? you know, i mean, i realize esthere s certainly a body of thought that somehow the shia-led government under nuri al malaki has not done enough to be inclusive of the sunnis and that this has led to some frustrations but i would encourage the viewers to understand this problem is embedded in a broader region,
namely in the sort of met tas ta sized is syrian crisis. to be sure, malaki could do better. i don t deny that for a minute but i think right now, to kind of blame the shia for this kind of level of sunni violence is to some extent really to blame the victim. so i think alla can i malaki going to have to see what he can do to meet this challenge militarily. he s going to have a challenge keeping shia groups from reforming into militia from keeping a more radicalized shia population. it s going to be tough. chris, i ve got to ask you this. it certainly seems this has escalated since american troops pulled out at the end of 2011. president bush went in there saying this was going to be some place of peace in the middle east, that this was going to be some sort of model. do you see where the u.s. got involved at all? is there any success here or is this just really ultimately a
about what on earth is going on in iraq. it seems to be a hot mess now. explain how this is related to the civil war in syria which is now turning into a regional war that has spilled into not only lebanon but now iraq. you ve got it. it has turned into a regional war. it is not to say that there aren t internal issues in iraq. but i think the prime issue is you have syria becoming a kind of magnet for every sunni islamist to come and fight. and certainly one of the great struggles for the sunnis in that region of the middle east is the fact that the shia now control iraq. and a few years ago, the u.s. military did a lot. they first of all, helped seal the border to prevent foreign fighters or to linlt foreign fighters from coming into iraq. secondly, they worked with sunni sheikhs in the anbar area where the two cities are located to