Sunni and Shiite are uniting to fight Al Qaeda:

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government's progress on mending the sectarian rift.

"What you find is these people have lived together for decades with no problem until the terrorists arrived and tried to instigate the problem," said Lt. Col. Valery Keaveny, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 509th Airborne unit in the Iskandariya area south of Baghdad. "So they are perfectly willing to work together to keep the terrorists out."

Note that this is grass roots, bottom-up cooperation. Over time, let's hope that it filters its way up to the government itself. If Iraq is really becoming a democracy, it should.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of civil wars, it's been a dozen dozen years, seven score and four, since Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address. Here's my post on the subject from three years ago.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend"...until the common enemy is defeated anyway. If this newfound camaraderie survives the expulsion of Al Quaeda then all well and good, but I'm not going to pretend to be surprised if they turn on one another once the more immediate threat has been dealt with.

I have faith. It will be easier for many to blame Al Queda for their problems now then to blame the shia/sunni whom they've actually known as neighbors for years. Al Queda and their madness may actually turn out to benefit Iraq in the long run.

This isn't what I'd expect a "let's fight Al-Qaeda out and THEN kill each other!" movement to look like. For one thing, there aren't enough backstabbings going on. For another, there's no reason why the Sunni and Shi'a would cooperate in that case - they'd stay apart from each other as much as possible while working with the US, and maybe trade fire when they came across each other.

My concern is that Iraqi politicians won't get the memo. We all know the stupidity of Washington politicians compared with the American population as a whole; why should we expect Iraq to be better?

I for one am fed up with 'faith based' foreign policy. There may not currently be 'civil war' in this part of the country, but the second that the coallition troops on they'll resume their millennia old tradition of ethnic cleansing.

I hope this lasts, but statistically this is going to be SNAFU again in a month or two.

"millennia old tradition of ethnic cleansing."

???

"", would you care to provide some specifics?