The grand gamble that is alienating the Shia government.

The arming of the Sunnis seems to be coming with little thought of what might come after.

The US military is conducting “accelerated” operations to arm Sunni tribes in the areas surrounding Baghdad, according to a report in an Arabic-language news source.....

According to the report, the leadership of the tribal forces have been granted military ranks without the involvement of the Iraqi interior ministry.

The authorities of Babil province have expressed their objection to the arming of the tribes in the northern areas of the province, on the outskirts of the capital, but the plan to arm the tribes continues, and security officials say that the number of tribes armed by the US forces has rapidly increased.

The Shia dominated government of Iraq hates this policy and I think it's notable that the US is trying to force military rank and order among these Sunni groups. The idea seems to be to work around the Shia government to create preestablished Sunni military groups that can later be absorbed whole, disallowing the previous Shia practice of dismantling the power of Sunni units as they come in.

And, just as a broader note, I still believe that the US is arming the Sunni groups as part of an effort to assuage the Saudis and keep the Saudis, as much as possible, out of Iraq.

As Saudi involvement in Iraq's Sunni groups is rarely discussed it's difficult to get a real sense of all the moving parts, but it's my sense that through this current "arming the Sunnis to defeat Al Qaeda" strategy, the US is trying to reshape the current Sunni resistance into a more mainline form.

The thing we don't know, if my assumption is true, is what Saudi mechanisms this is intended to replace. How deeply were the Saudis involved with the "foreign fighters" in Iraq?