<blockquote>
"Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault. Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating. Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.</blockquote>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

If the above is true, it explains why Yon thinks it may "get worse before it gets better."

But here Yon’s descriptor becomes too tightly packed:

"These are serious setbacks with the Shia militias, but its not the end of the world, its not civil war thats for sure. That ended last year. The civil war ended, especially, when we started beating down al-Qaeda."

Yon’s description  now appears clumsily jammed. Is he  cloaking the potential of a looming civil war by obscuring it with rhetorical civil war terminus? While this isn’t a "religious" civil war, it’s not just "about money and power": It’s about patriotism, liberty, fighting the "evil American crusaders", removing an occupation.

Certainly it’s not a civil war now, but there is very good and clear reason to be concerned another one looms.  It’s a concern the ISG made and as well as numerous military commanders …even conservatives:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/iraq_army_offensive_in_basra_s.html

Contrary to Yon, the Sunni-Shia civil war wasn’t solely religious in nature either, but was and is just as political; it’s one of the main reasons for the country’s present division sticking points in political reconciliation– the Sunni’s want "power and resources" –just as the Shia militias do.

So, while the inter-Shia conflict may not have the religious elements the Sunni-Shia conflict had,  it has the political elements, which are just as volatile: Sadr opposes a US occupation, as did/do the Sunnis, while the Maliki government supports it. … and it’s this description that is the crux of the U.S problem in Iraq.