to several leaders of the Sunni Iraqi insurgency, and they don't like it, they consider it another enemy, like the U.S. Neither do they like what they see as the meddling of "Iranians." And they acknowledge that not participating in the political formation process was a big mistake.

I learned that and a lot of other very interesting things in Nir Rosen's May 13 New York Times Sunday Magazine piece, "The Flight from Iraq."

Highly recommended piece as to the current big picture situation. If you don't have time for the whole article, start at page 6:

Syria sees the Iraqi civil war through the prism of Lebanon...."The temptation is there,” a top official at the U.N. refugee agency told me, referring to the possibility of bringing the refugees into the civil war. “The money from Bin Laden is there. If the international community doesn’t help, then the other groups will, and all hell will break loose. Iraqis are sitting in Syria and Jordan where the Baathists and Wahhabis are strongest. If 1 percent of the two million can be bought, then that is very dangerous.” He noted that money came from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and was disbursed there. “This problem will be with us for a long time,” he said, shaking his head in frustration.....

Many Iraqi resistance leaders have based themselves in the relative safety of Amman and Damascus. It isn’t always clear how active they are in Iraq, or how active they expect to be, but they are a long way from giving up. What’s most striking about these men is the sense that they have become trapped — militarily, at least — between Al Qaeda and its ilk, on one side, and the Americans on the other, with a dangerous Shiite-dominated, Green Zone-based government to the east and an irritable, secessionist Kurdish region to the north....

Note: Rosen's Iraq reporting work in the past has been highly recommended by Juan Cole.