"Red on red"

In a sign of just how bad things have been in Iraq, this now sounds like great news: the insurgents may be turning on one another, with "nationalists" battling the "jihadists."

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added.

The insurgency is largely hidden, making such trends difficult to discern. But marines in this western outpost have noticed a change. For Matthew Orth, a Marine sniper, the difference came this spring, when his unit was conducting an operation in Husayba. Mortar shells flew over the unit, hitting a different target.

"The thought was, "They're coming for us. But then we saw they were fighting each other," he recalled during a break in Monday's operation. "We were kind of wondering what happened. We were getting mortared twice a day, and then all of a sudden it stopped."

If this were happy talk coming out of the Pentagon, I'd be dubious. But this sounds fairly plausible. Indeed it may explain the stories lately of the U.S. negotiating with "terrorists." And it may be another argument in favor of pulling the U.S. out on a rapid timetable. If the nationalists, or Sunni Ba'athist "deadenders," whatever, don't have the U.S. to target, they can focus on "defending" their country from the other foreign fighters. Of course, it will probably also lead to a civil war, but that's always been a real possibility, with or without a U.S. troop presence.