Sy Hersh: America’s strategic shift.

The latest New Yorker piece from Seymour Hersh is absolutely indispensible reading. In a wide-ranging overview of the current situation in the Middle East, Hersh highlights the basic underlying contradiction of US policy:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush
Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in
the Middle East…

…A by-product of these activities has
been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant
vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One
contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the
insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from
Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. (New Yorker)