Don't forget that the Sunni Arabs have lost even though they continue to kill:
The blunt truth of this new phase in the fight for Iraq is that the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. The great flight from Baghdad to Jordan, to Syria, to other Arab destinations, has been the flight of Baghdad's Sunni middle-class. It is they who had the means of escape, and the savings.
Further, let us not fall for the Sunni Arab propaganda that tries to reverse the battlefield defeats of the Sunni Arabs with victories in our State Department:
For our part, we can't give full credence to the Sunni representations of things. We can cushion the Sunni defeat but can't reverse it. Our soldiers have not waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against Sunni extremists to fall for the fear of some imagined "Shia crescent" peddled by Sunni rulers and preachers. To that atavistic fight between Sunni and Shia, we ought to remain decent and discerning arbiters. To be sure, in Iraq itself we can't give a blank check to Shia maximalism. On its own, mainstream Shi'ism is eager to rein in its own diehards and self-anointed avengers.
We fought for the despised (by the Sunnis) and oppressed Shias, and delivered them from Saddam's cruel rule. Yet the Shias fear that the long dominant Sunnis will screw them over in the end. And the simulteneous determination of the Sunni Arabs to either win or perish in Iraq, expecting salvation from the wider Sunni Arab world, complicates our search for a political settlement:
They had made their own bed, the Sunni Arabs, but old habits of dominion die hard, and save but for a few, there is precious little acknowledgment of the wages of the terror that the Shia had been subjected to in the years that followed the American invasion. As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency. It is late in the hour, but there is still eagerness in the Maliki government to conciliate the Sunnis, if only to give the country a chance at normalcy.
The Shia have come into their own, but there still hovers over them their old history of dispossession; there still trails shadows of doubt about their hold on power, about conspiracies hatched against them in neighboring Arab lands.
The Americans have given birth to this new Shia primacy, but there lingers a fear, in the inner circles of the Shia coalition, that the Americans have in mind a Sunni-based army, of the Pakistani and Turkish mold, that would upend the democratic, majoritarian bases of power on which Shia primacy rests. They are keenly aware, these new Shia men of power in Baghdad, that the Pax Americana in the region is based on an alliance of long standing with the Sunni regimes. They are under no illusions about their own access to Washington when compared with that of Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and the smaller principalities of the Persian Gulf. This suspicion is in the nature of things; it is the way of once marginal men who had come into an unexpected triumph.
Read the whole piece. It addresses so many topics of past posts that I have written that I cannot recommend it enough.
Remember, too many of the people who speak of political settlements and regional talks are essentially advocating a diplomatic reversal of our battlefield victory over the Sunni Arab Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Long comfortable dealing with the dominant and often Western educated Sunni elites, our own elites are wary of the Shias. So wary that our elites sometimes seem like they regret the overthrow of the Sunni Saddam regime.
Since when are we supposed to side with the oppressors? Is this what the "reality-based community" has come to represent? They really need to review what "progressive" means.
