Sunni leaders sense that their Shiite counterparts believe the era of Sunni leadership in Iraq is gone for good -- "that Humpty Dumpty had a fall and cannot be put back together again" as one senior Iraqi official put it -- and Sunnis should accept the new reality. Sunni leaders, however, tend to express more limited goals than reclaiming the government.
Egg mataphors from the West, the final humiliation. Where is there found a single Humpty or a lone Dumpty in the Koran? Death to the infidel invader!
The idea of "reconciliation" in Iraq has always been short on specifics. To Sunnis, it tends to mean Shiites will release their grip on decision-making, allow them greater influence in the government, crack down on militants regardless of their sect and promote peaceful cooperation between politicians. Sunnis demand the release of thousands of prisoners who have never been charged, the purging of all militiamen from the Iraqi security forces and influence in military decisions.
That sounds to me like a more than specific program--also a program that mirrors American intent (so far as intent can be presumed)--remembering that these are also the people we ran out of government, thus turning them against us.
"It's clearly perceived by the government that reconciliation is clearly a winner for the Sunnis and not a winner for the Shias," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief of staff for the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq. "The question becomes: How do you start balancing that scale a little bit?"
I'll level with you, Joe. It's not our job to balance their scales at the present cost. What is 'balancing the scales,' the next administration goal it's about until it isn't?
Sit down and have a smoke, Joe. "The question becomes" is what's put us on the Iraqi ropes for five years now. The question should have been answered (or at least asked) before 'Mission Accomplished' came undone.
And by the way, while we're at it, how come the chief of staff to #2 never got that 'clearly perceived by the government' into the Petraeus report? I don't remember the general whispering that particular detail into the congressional ear.
The Iraqi government plans to consolidate its cabinet and install skilled technocrats in place of inexperienced political appointees, officials said. Hamoudi, the Shiite member of parliament, said he expected that the 37 cabinet seats would be reduced to 22 or 23 in coming months. Certain public service ministries, such as Justice, Transportation, Health and Agriculture, would in theory become "independent" from political parties, he said.
What was that about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
We no longer have choices in Iraq and those who claim we do are whistling past the graveyard. This administration, by a combination of lies, hubris, arrogance, incompetence, thievery and misjudgment, has taken from us the slightest possibility of choice.
This president, exerting unparalleled control over a fearful nation, a supine Congress and a derelict judiciary, has wrecked any chance of conciliatory politics in the Middle East for decades to come. He has engineered a military and political disaster without precedent, leaving us the bitter option of abandoning Iraq to ethnic cleansing or staying to witness and participate in it.
His brutal and cowardly decision is to do nothing until January 19, 2009, when the next president takes office. He will then blame the failure of the war on his successor's unwillingness to 'stay the course' and whine through the balance of his Nixon-redux life that victory could have (and should have) been his.
His legacy to the nation and history is 25,000 crushed Americans and another 4,000 killed, a sovereign nation preemptively attacked and destroyed, a million Iraqi civilians dead, a military, a currency and an international reputation in shambles.
As Walter Cronkite used to sign off, 'that's the way it is,' a mere three weeks after the Petraeus report to the Congress of the United States.
Jim Freeman's op-ed pieces and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The New York Review, The Jon Stewart Daily Show and a number of magazines.
