Merely dismissing these schisms as non-political will get one into trouble.
quickly.
On the drive in to work, a segment from NPR made mention of the POTUS's recent comments in Latvia: "There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by al Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal."

If we cannot take the Al Qaeda glasses off for even a few moments and stop dithering about with "opinions", we'll continue to get into trouble.

And then to say, "The Iranians and the Syrians should help _ not destabilize _ this young democracy," smacks of an inability to understand that our interests alone do not define the conflict. We may characterize Syrian and Iranian actions as destablizing, but we really have to get over ourselves and think about how they view things, from their perspective, for a change.

Syria and Iran are in the mix for political and ethnic reasons. The motives are blurred because every action is considered a threat to the democratic baby we have, but I seriously doubt that many regional actors see Iraq in that light.