Sunni and Shiite are uniting to fight Al Qaeda:

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.

“What you find is these people have lived together for decades with no problem until the terrorists arrived and tried to instigate the problem,” said Lt. Col. Valery Keaveny, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 509th Airborne unit in the Iskandariya area south of Baghdad. “So they are perfectly willing to work together to keep the terrorists out.”

Note that this is grass roots, bottom-up cooperation. Over time, let’s hope that it filters its way up to the government itself. If Iraq is really becoming a democracy, it should.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of civil wars, it’s been a dozen dozen years, seven score and four, since Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address. Here’s my post on the subject from three years ago.