It's long past the time for the United States to pretend that it has solution to the Rubik's Cube in Iraq, though it's still possible for administration to make things worse. So, now we are arming the Sunni resistance, or at least parts of it. Only last year, the entire focus of the U.S. counterinsurgency operation in Iraq was to crush the resistance. It didd't work, and Khalilzad started talking about how the main enemy was the Shia militias and sectarian killings. Then, around February, he switched, and started saying that the bad guys were the Sunnis again -- thus, the surge, aimed at ending Sunni resistance to the occupation. Now, the bad guys are Al Qaeda, and we're arming the Sunnis.

This would be funny if it weren't tragic. My own view is that rather than arming both sides in the Iraqi civil war, which is what we are doing by building Sunni militias, we ought to arm neither side -- in other words, we must stop arming the Shia-Kurdish army and police. And get out. (Getting out will include negotiating with the Sunni-led resistance for a ceasefire, but that's not the same thing are arming them!)

Of course,, the Shia religious parties and KUrdish warlords are frantic with opposition to the new policy of arming the Sunnis. "They are trusting terrorists," says Ali al-Adeeb, a Shia leader.

Prime Minister Maliki himself complained about the new policy, in an interview with Newsweek: "Some field commanders make mistakes ... by arming tribes sometimes, and this is dangerous because this will create new militias. I believe that the coalition forces do not know the backgrounds of the tribes. It is a job of the (Iraqi) government."

At the Pentagon, McClatchy reports, there is grumbling about the new policy:

At the Pentagon, at least six officers who served in Iraq shook their heads when asked about the idea of arming the Sunnis. They said they had little faith in a Sunni community that was aggressively killing their comrades just months ago.

Why did we spend all that capital disarming them last year?" asked one military officer who served in Iraq last year under former Iraq commander Gen. George Casey. "As a military man, I cannot fathom the logic of putting more weapons out there." The officer declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the matter.

The McClatchy piece includes a funny quote from General Odierno, the surge-master, who was asked if the Iraqi government is concerned about the new policy: "Sure they are concerned," he said. "They want to make sure that we are not forming a Sunni militia that will fight the government."

What's shocking isn't that the United States is arming guerrillas from the resistance it spent years fighting. No, what's shocking is the utter bankruptcy of U.S. policy, which tacks this way and that in order to make a failing policy succeed. News flash: nothing will work.