Set aside the sheer irony that the United States is fighting with heavy weapons, helicopters and F-15s less than a mile from the Green Zone in Baghdad. What happened this week in the Haifa Street area of Baghdad is this: the sectarian, Shiite-run puppet government of Iraq enlisted the United States in an escalation of its own bloody ethnic cleansing of west Baghdad.

The full force of U.S. military power was brought to bear on a Sunni civilian neighborhood in the center of the city. Dozens were killled. Here is an utterly stupid quote from the U.S. colonel on the scene:

"It's an area that needed to be brought back under Iraqi security control," said Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, a US military spokesman. "There is a progression of missions that are ongoing. It's not against any particular group or militia. Most of it is driven by the Iraqi government."

Driven by the Iraqi government? Yes--but the Iraqi government is in the hands of fanatical militamen and the Shiite fundamentalists associated with Islamic Dawa, SCIRI, and others. Not directed against any particular group? It was aimed squarely at the Sunni mainstream.

Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, called the operation "a bloody sectarian massacre." (The AMS, a Sunni group, calls itself the political wing of the armed resistance in Iraq.) Many Iraqi politicians from the Sunni community, including the Iraqi Islamic Party -- whose leader just visited the White House -- denounced the U.S. operation.

Following the U.S. raid that demolished a headquarters of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni political party whose leader has been trying to broker national reconciliation talks with the resistance, it appears utterly clear that the Bush "surge" in Iraq will be aimed at purging Baghdad of the Sunni insurgency, leaving the Shiite fundamentalists intact and in control.