"Why not have the Shia death squads work for us? They can surely wipe out all the Sunnis and Al Qedas. We just have to remember to kill Al Sadr & Co. once we're done."

Why should they work for us? They have their own interests and no matter how much we pay them at the end of the day they will take our money and achieve their objectives.

Several million Sunnis remain in Iraq. No, Sadr cannot wipe them out. They have far more experience at terror and torture than the local Shia. The Sunni that don't will follow their brethren into Saudi, Jordan and Syria. If there are no effective coalition forces in Iraq these countries will soon intervene to protect fellow Sunni. Iran will quickly follow (if it's not there first). The average Jordanian  is already disaffected by the increase in the cost of living, particularly rental accomodation, and the volume of traffic on the roads caused by the several hundred thousand Iraqi Sunni refugees that have come here in the past few years with their Mercedes' and ill-gotten bagfuls of US dollars.

Intervention by opposing Middle Eastern sovereign nations will be very messy, very bloody and disastrous. No doubt about it.

If we can't deal with Al-Sadr now there is little chance of going back in cold and dealing with them when (if) they've weakened their enemies and increased their influence and support.

We stay and do the job.

Cheers.

Well that's the problem--I don't see a way for us to stay and finish the job.

The Sunnis are simultaneously trying to blow us up, but desperately desiring our presence to keep the Shia from slaughtering the few that haven't fled the country.  Various factions of the Shia death squads (including Sadr) are getting their cash and support from Iran--which we're not allowed to directly engage.  Then you have Al Qeda who even the home-grown Iraqi terrorists don't like, but seemingly have infinite resources to remain an irritant in Iraq for years to come.  Oh and, the Kurds seem to not be involved, and not really wanted, in the battle for the rest of Iraq.

Now back in the good ol' days, we'd just give money and weapons to all of these kooks (who didn't always know where it was coming from) and let them all kill each other.  The only problem is, last time they kept the money and the weapons and then came back and killed a bunch of us (9/11) or generally made themselves global menaces of varying magnitude s (Iraq, Iran).  The inevitable proxy war phase of the global war on terror is kind of worrying to me as that's how we got into this mess in the first place.