Insane Escalation

I've taken a self-imposed hiatus from blogging (mostly due to ennui, also in deference to the many other more committed and incisive bloggers out there), but this choice quote from this morning's NYT article on the Democratic opposition to Bush's Iraq War escalation caught my eye:

In an interview on Tuesday, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, said he was becoming increasingly skeptical that a troop increase was in the best interest of the United States. “I’m particularly concerned about the greater injection of our troops into the middle of sectarian violence. Whom do you shoot at, the Sunni or the Shia?” Mr. Warner said.

Good question. Who do you shoot at? How about militarized combatants. I'm no military strategist, but my guess is that you wouldn't want to just shoot willy-nilly at people belonging to one or the other religious sects-that is, if our political leaders and military personnel know enough about the differences to distinguish which group is which.