By Andrew L. Jaffee

Iraq’s terrorists upped the ante today, savagely killing 75 people and injuring 160 at a Shiite “second-hand clothes market popular with the city’s poorer residents” in Baghdad, just as new American troops arrived to shore up security in the nation’s capital. Of course the attack was timed to coincide with the U.S. troops’ arrival. Such cynical evil has worked in the past for Iraq’s terrorists, so they’re trying to scuttle any hopes for the U.S.’s last chance in Iraq to succeed, by using tried and tested methods of inflaming sectarian tensions. Iraq’s Shiites showed enormous restraint while Sunni terrorists were killing them en masse — that is, until the Samarra bombing. The Sunni strategy of stoking hatred worked. Go with what works, right? Cynical, but pragmatic in an evil kind of way.