| Summary/Abstract |
When the dissident media group WikiLeaks published more than a quarter-million US diplomatic cables from 2010 to 2011, it included thousands of cables written by US diplomats involved in the War in Iraq (2003–2011). Although the scholarly literature covers many aspects of the war from the perspective of US officials, it has largely excluded the viewpoints captured by the WikiLeaks cables. In this article, I use the cables to reveal the thinking of US diplomats during one of the most violent phases of the war, the sectarian war, which peaked from 2006 to 2007. The cables document the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad from 2006 to 2007 and provide new information about the factors that caused the rise and fall of sectarian violence. The cables show that US actions contributed to the sectarian violence.
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