Behold, once again, how Iraq's sectarian agenda clashes, scratches, claws, kicks and undermines the U.S.'s counterterrorism agenda. Leila Fadel and Hussein Kadhim:

Officials in Iraq's mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq's new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

"The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won't raise it," said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, "If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida."

The Awakening Councils are, to understate matters, a rather flawed vehicle for fighting al-Qaeda. But, normative judgments aside, they're also The Plan. The more we promote them, the more ability they'll have to undermine not only the Maliki government but the U.S.-brokered political process that guarantees Shiite power in Iraq. And safeguarding that process is at least 50 percent of the reason we care about fighting AQI in the first place. Why, it's almost as if the Iraq war doesn't make any sense!