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This is a prescription for civil war. The Shia will not be powerful enough to pacify the Sunni. A Sunni insurgency versus the Shia will be orders of magnitude more intense than the insurgency versus America, because the Sunni who support us will not support the Shia. The Shia do not and will not have the disparity of arms with the Sunni that existed in Hussein's Iraq, nor will they have the impunity of Saddam (at least not soon enough to preempt a viable Sunni revolt). The best way to make the point is that we are recruiting, training, and arming Sunni even more vigorously than Shia (in the hope that they will then pacify their own brethren).

Moreover, the secularized Kurds fear a Shia theocracy at least as much if not more so than a return of Saddam Hussein. The Kurds will reject a non-federalist central government and seek at least de facto independence (which they already have and can defend from the rest of Iraq if needed). Finally, the signs are very much there that the Shia will themselves split into a moderate and extremist camp once the unifying presense of America is removed. If we leave anytime soon, Iraq will collapse, and breathless fantasies that 'the Sunni will finally get what's coming to them' are just a way to make some of us feel better about the debacle.

JMHO...

"This is a prescription for civil war."

Hey, I'm not ADVOCATING this outcome, I am merely observing what is going on and seeing the cards fall into place.

The Sunni parties have taken themselves out of the election.
The Sunni provinces are the ones where the terrorists are able to disrupt things.
The Sunni Arabs are only 15% of the population as it is.
And the Shi'ites (and Kurds) have both been victims, to the tune of a million people, of the same people tormenting Iraq now, not in ancient history, but within the past 10 and 5 years.
What the terrorists with Sunni support are doing right now is fomenting a civil war, but the other, long suppressed ethnicities do not yet hold the reins of government power.

They are going to get the power on January 31st, and because the Sunnis are eliminating themselves from the voter pool both by withdrawal AND by terrorism in the Sunni provinces, the Sunnis will have even less power and representation in the government than they otherwise would.

The civil war already has been going on in Iraq for a long time. When the Baathists dropped gas on the Kurds and sent in their armies to butcher the marsh Arabs. All quite recently. The Kurds and the marsh Arabs, and all of the other ethnicities who the Sunni Triangle used to torment are about to get all the power.

It's not a matter of WANTING this revanche, it's a matter of expecting it.

About the only way to avert it is for the SUNNIS to stop their terrorism NOW and get into the election game. And that is the LEAST likely thing to happen. Given that, it is unlikely that when the power shifts, there will be any gentility on the part of the new rulers.

As to the Shi'ites being unable to win, so long as they do not attempt to lord it over Kurdistan (and there is no particular reason to expect them to try), with a 4:1 advantage over the Shi'ites (6:1 if you add in the Kurds), they probably can win a civil war. The Sunnis are not supermen. They have only held sway because they had the reins of government. That is the one thing that will NOT come out of the election.