Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan

With more than 75 dead in Baghdad bomb blasts, and with violence picking up in Afghanistan, at least Pakistan seems to be a calm place!

Meanwhile, Charles Cooper at CBS writes:

For some reason, this story has not received as much attention as it ought to. Turns out that United States General Ray Odierno and Iraq's leadership are at odds over the timetable for the departure of American forces. How this issue gets resolved is likely to have major implications for both countries and, perhaps, the wider region.

What is the "issue? It all comes down to the Kurdish angle. The Iraqi government is not too keen on any active cooperation between the US forces and the Kurds. The Kurdish situation is an unresolved one through the six years of our presence in Iraq.
Writing in the Independent, Patrick Cockburn observed that the only thing preventing the Kurds and the Arabs from fighting is the presence of US forces.

It is called the "trigger line", a 300-mile long swathe of disputed territory in northern Iraq where Arab and Kurdish soldiers confront each other, and which risks turning into a battlefield. As the world has focused on the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, and the intensifying war in Afghanistan, Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have been getting closer to an all out war over control of the oil-rich lands stretching from the borders of Syria in the west to Iran in the east.
....
President Barack Obama's administration is alarmed by the prospect of Iraq splitting apart just as the US pulls its troops out. But Washington can also see the danger of becoming more deeply enmeshed in the Arab-Kurdish conflict, which kept northern Iraq ablaze for much of the last century. US withdrawal also frightens the Kurds, the one Iraqi community that supported the US-led invasion. They can see the political and military balance is swinging against them just as they are faced by Mr Maliki's rejuvenated Iraqi government commanding the increasingly confident 600,000-strong Iraqi security forces. A report by the International Crisis Group concluded recently that "without the glue that US troops have provided, Iraq's political actors are otherwise likely to fight all along the trigger line following a withdrawal, emboldened by a sense that they can prevail, if necessary, with outside help."

So, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?