A Triple Threat

A better combination of wishful thinking, risible cluelessness, and getting off-message would be hard to come by:

Gates Warns Shiite militias against alienating Iraqi civilians.

In an interview, Pentagon chief observes the Mahdi Army may be making same mistakes that caused Sunnis to turn against al Qaeda. "The excesses of force and violence...may have caused people to start to think," he says.

Though it's too early to tell whether that will happen in majority-Shiite country, he adds, "This is one of those things...just bubbling under the surface." Gates concedes an irony of terror war is the U.S. has "eliminated Iran's two worst enemies in the Taliban and Saddam Hussein."

But Iraqi leader al-Maliki hasn't gotten "enough credit...(for) pushing back on the Iranians," he concludes.