Since those attacks, quasi-armies of residents in mixed and majority-Sunni Arab neighborhoods have formed to protect their streets.  Sunni Web sites are offering advice on how to kill Shiite militiamen.  College students and executives pace at their homes, clutching rifles and handguns around the clock.  Iraqis are posting pleas on Internet message boards to buy extra ammunition and weapons.


It's near impossible to doubt that the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni is coming full circle, when you read stories like this:


Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms rounded up 21 men, including a 12-year-old boy, from two Shiite homes in the village of Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province.  On Saturday morning, their bodies were found, all handcuffed, blindfolded and shot to death, said Bahaa al-Sodani, a provincial police official.  The attacks were in apparent retaliation for assaults by Shiite militiamen on Sunni mosques in Baghdad and Baqubah the previous day.


And this:

As Sammaraie watched from his front gate, two militiamen stopped a Sunni man who worked in an electrical shop.  A local informant looked at him and nodded.  Then one of the gunmen shot him dead and left.  Two weeks ago, the electrician had complained loudly when Shiite gunmen attacked a nearby Sunni mosque.

A half-hour after the electrician was killed, police arrived to investigate.  The militiamen who committed the crime came along.

"It was the same murderers — I saw it with my own eyes," Sammaraie said.


And this:

On Palestine Street, Fehad Galib heard the rumors.  The Mahdi Army had rounded up 150 young Sunni men like him and taken them to Jamila Market, the area in Sadr City where two of Thursday's car bombs exploded.  Then they executed them.  There was another rumor — that the Interior Ministry was handing out police uniforms to the Mahdi Army.


The Interior Ministry reports to US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The Mahdi Army reports to pro-civil war Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. 

Maliki's political power is derived from one event, and one relationship. 

The event was the killing of chief insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which Maliki had the sheer good luck to preside over within weeks of his appointment to prime minister, and which gave Maliki credibility with the Bush Administration. 

The relationship is his political alliance with fellow Shiite al-Sadr.  While Maliki plays the public game of pretending to develop a coalition government with the Sunni minority, al-Sadr and his army go about the business of eradicating the Sunni minority. 

The Sunnis don't sincerely participate in the government either, since they predict that a strong Iraqi government, with an overwhelming Shiite-Kurd majority, would be their own Final Solution.  The pro-insurgency Sunnis, ironically, are dependent on the presence of American forces to slow this solution down.  They have no long-term survival game plan. 

And the Shia have no long-term plan for their country that includes the Sunnis, either.  They are operating on the ice cold reality that they don't have to.

While our president talks about "benchmarks" this fake Iraqi "government" cannot even bother to pretend to meet, a genocide—the real work of the Maliki administration—is being orchestrated with withering, near-inevitable success.  It is a genocide the Sunnis would gladly perpetrate on the Shiites just as ferociously, with as little hesitation.  They simply lack the numbers.