I will give my bottom line up front. I believe Americans, while remaining tactically patient about Iraq, should be strategically optimistic. Most important, a major change - a tectonic shift - has taken place in the political orientation of the Sunni Arab community. A year ago, Sunni Arabs were outside of the political process and hostile to the United States. They boycotted the January 2005 election and were underrepresented in the transitional national assembly. Today, Sunni Arabs are full participants in the political process, with their representation in the national assembly now proportional to their share of the population. Also, they have largely come to see the United States as an honest broker in helping Iraq's communities come together around a process and a plan to stabilize the country.
Moreover, al Qaeda in Iraq has been significantly weakened during the past year. This resulted, not only from the recent killing of Zarqawi, but also from the capture or killing of a number of other senior leaders and the creation of an environment in which it is more difficult and dangerous for al Qaeda in Iraq.
These are fundamental and positive changes. Together, they have made possible the inauguration of Iraq's first ever government of national unity - with non-sectarian security ministers, agreements on rules for decision making on critical issues and on the structure of institutions of the executive branch, and a broadly agreed upon program. They have also enabled political progress that resulted in the recent announcement by Prime Minister Maliki of his government's National Reconciliation and Dialogue Project.
I've written about his movement before. We face a situation with allies, neutrals, and enemies inside Iraq. Our mission is to keep allies with us, move neutrals to become our allies, and reduce the number of enemies by killing them or moving them to neutrality or even ally status over time. This is complicated and requires different methods for each.
But the movement has been happening since summer 2004 when I pointed out that the Baathists had screwed up by allying with the jihadis and alienating the suspicious Shias. And victory will probably be a relatively sudden event rather than the slowly declining foe that so many assume. Get a major faction to come in from the cold and others will rush to join to avoid being the last in the field--possibly targeted because of the earlier defections. And then just the die hards and foreign jihadis will remain to be hunted down by all Iraqis.
And then our war in Iraq will be over.
