During 2006, we tried to get the Sunni Arabs to finally lay down their arms and end their fight (I'm suspending my Times DeSelect policy for this link only):
The meetings began in early 2006 and were quite possibly the first attempts at sustained contact between senior American officials here and the Sunni Arab insurgency. Mr. Khalilzad flew to Jordan for some of the talks, which included self-identified representatives of the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, two leading nationalist factions, American and Iraqi officials said. Mr. Khalilzad declined to give details on the meetings, but other officials said the efforts had foundered by the summer, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off waves of sectarian violence.
This is entirely consistent with my description of the war's Phase V during 2006. The Sunni Arabs were defeated and the question was getting them to give up before they were expelled from Iraq. We hoped to draw down our troops to under 100,000 becasue the Sunnis were defeated, while the Iraqis themselves confronted the Shia militia problem (Sadr and others) as more of an internal problem. Remember, we talked not out of our weakness but because we had defeated the Baathists and Sunni Arab "nationalists."
Instead, the sectarian violence fostered by Iran and Syria (with jihadis on the one side and Shia thugs on the other) made it necessary for our troops to go back into Baghdad to directly control the city rather than rely on the Iraqis to control the Shia death squads. This was a new level of the Sadr threat and our current surge into Baghdad is only the latest attempt to combat this threat since the Samarra bombing over the last year or so. It is a needed change that I speculated about nearly a year ago.
We are again making progress in bringing the non-jihadi Sunni Arabs in from the cold as we tried to do in Phase V. And a partial amnesty for Baathists not obviously guilty of crimes is one part of this effort. While Anbar Sunni Arabs fight with us, those in central Iraq are more difficult to convince. But we will convince them to unite against the jihadis.
We are winning. Let's not surrender to a dying enemy.
