Nice to see that Iraq's Sunni insurgents are getting over their silly al-Qaeda phase and have gotten down to the serious task of arming themselves for civil war:

BAGHDAD, Feb 6 (Reuters) -- Sunni Arabs have formed their own militia to counter Shi'ite and Kurdish forces as part of an attempt to regain influence they lost after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

The so-called "Anbar Revolutionaries" have emerged from a split in the anti-U.S. insurgency, which included al Qaeda.

... a key motive behind the militia's emergence is to have a force on the ground to confront the Shi'ite Badr Brigades, whom the Sunnis accuse of killing and torturing members of their sect in death squads sanctioned by the government, the officials added....

The story goes on to suggest that this is actually a good thing for the Americans:

...the new militia will have a more formal structure than existing insurgent forces including al Qaeda, and could be easier for U.S. and Iraqi officials to talk to.

Translation: They may kidnap their enemies and kill them without trial or hang them upside down for days, just like their Shiite counterparts (see this New York Times story for more on that), but as long as they don't praise bin Laden while they're doing it, we can do business with them.

And apparently that's just what we'll do:

...The Anbar Revolutionaries are being built up as diplomats say U.S. officials are shifting favour from Iraq's pro-Iranian Shi'ite leaders to Sunnis because of Tehran's nuclear ambitions....

Well, what else can we do? We really might have to work with the very people who are blowing up our soldiers with IEDs. After all, it never occurred to us that if we overthrew the secular Sunni government of Saddam with no plan for guiding the aftermath, while simultaneously daring the very religious Shiite Iranians to defy us, we'd see Shiites trying to build a nuke in Iran and on the ascent in Iraq. But hey, nobody could have foreseen the possibility of that, right? The Arab/Muslim world is utterly unknowable, isn't it?