Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere…
The debate in Washington over troop numbers is intense. But in Baghdad, there’s been little sense of alarm or urgency among the Iraqi politicians who would have the most to lose if the United States decides to begin a major pull back.
Both Sunni and Shiite leaders have been largely convinced for weeks that President Bush would press to keep forces in Iraq until he turns the White House over to a successor.
That has set up one of the grand ironies of the troop build-up that began early this year.
Washington threw more personnel and firepower into Iraq to give the Iraqi leadership more room to settle disputes and adopt U.S.-backed reforms.
But the signals this week of just modest troop withdrawals ahead — perhaps back to pre-surge levels of about 130,000 — mean the Shiite-led government feels little pressure to accelerate work toward true political reconciliation.
Instead, they are focusing their energy on shoring up their positions: outflanking political challengers, leaning on more-radical Shiite factions to behave and flirting with Sunni sheiks to build personal alliances.
Iraq’s national security adviser was asked Wednesday to explain why the government has been so slow to enact power-sharing agreements that Washington deems necessary for lasting peace. He had nothing new to offer.
"Of course we want to do it, but they are so complicated," Mouwaffak al-Rubaie said.
In Iraq’s political reality today, Shiites who account for 60 percent of the population hold the country’s political power and have no intention of yielding it to Sunnis.
Neither side has given up on violence to achieve its goals.
"Many Sunnis continue to see their political pre-eminence as a birthright. And most Shiites believe that their numerical superiority and the oppression they suffered under Saddam Hussein give them the right to dominate the new Iraq," one war critic, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, noted this week.
In the movies of my childhood [and beyond], the Arabs are portrayed as the masters of the marketplace – driving shrewd bargains. Why it took Legionnaire John Wayne all 12 episodes in the gripping Saturday Serial ‘The Three Musketeers’ to prevail. The formulation in this news article makes perfect sense. Even Luger’s otherwise sensible assessment leaves the jockeying for position and setting up for the deal out of the equation. It must be confusing to the warring factions 
that we’re trying to get them to settle their differences when they’ve had so little time to languish in their own civil war. Overthrowing a minority government and then expecting the suppressed side and the previously empowered side to embrace some middle ground seems incredibly naive. We learned to fight our own civil wars at the polls rather than on the battlefield by having one of the bloodiest wars history has ever known. Leave them alone. They’ll figure it out when they figure it out [if they’re going to figure it out].
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