Samarra mosque bombing
The news of today's bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra is terrible news. The immediate reaction, including Shiite reprisals agains Sunni mosques, threatens to ignite the sectarian war that the foreign insurgents have long sought.
Fortunately, the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish leadership are all calling for calm and blaming the violence on al Qaeda. My hope is that this attack will turn out to be the "Iraqi 9-11": an event where the enemy drastically over-stepped, igniting a backlash against the insurgency that they didn't anticipate. Only time will tell...