"President Obama has been quite clear on this," Petraeus said at a talk at the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty on Wednesday. "This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight. It has to be a fight of all of Iraq against extremists."
Petraeus' comments not only underscore the worry of a Sunni/Shia civil war, but also the concern that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is too corrupt to support.
According to Petraeus, any American backing should come with a caveat: "‘If there is to be support for Iraq, it has to be support for a government of Iraq. That is, a government of all the people, and that is representative of and responsive to all elements of Iraq."