Unqualified Offerings

I’ve become convinced I undersold the news value of the President’s speech last night. In my defense, I think this is because the Prez deliberately underplayed it. We are seeing, on our side and theirs, some furious if furtive overtures. Nobody’s dancing yet, but people are making eyes across the room.

I already highlighted the brief reference the President made foreswearing any desire to take up permanent residence in Mesopotamia. Let’s leave the sincerity of that passage aside for now.

Next, turn to Billmon’s hermeneutics on the text of the address, in which he scries multiple, subtle parsings of our enemies in Iraq into “terrorists” and not-terrorists. (For some reason Billmon is disgusted by this.)

Lastly, a report on the not-terrorists themselves:

The official, who has held numerous meetings with what he called “influential fence sitters,” said the representatives have told him they are only tolerating foreign terrorists because they are a “pressure tool” to force the Shi’ites and the U.S. to consider Sunni political demands for more representation in the Baghdad government.

“We’ll catch him when we’re ready,” the official quoted one Sunni as telling him, referring to Zarqawi.

Via OTB.

Now the “senior official” may be blowing smoke. If there’s anything to it, then the initial outlines of a deal take shape on both sides. The Sunnis play nice and choke off the jihadis, preferably as literally as possible, the US gets the Shiites to ratchet down the tacit civil war and clear a space at the feed trough for Sunni poobahs, and we vamoose. If the senior official is making it all up, it remains supporting evidence that the hints in the President’s speech about being willing to deal with some insurgent factions are policy, and that withdrawal is on the table.

Do I think the Administration is sincere about willingness to withdraw? I don’t know. I think they’d hate it. But some meals don’t go down smoothly, and they may prefer to disgorge this one. Are Sunni elders sincere about their willingness to throw out the foreign terrorists? I think so. Ultimately the Sunni rebels are about the money and the influence, and the good swag only comes if the country is relatively calm and functional. And they saw what happened to Afghanistan in the 1990s, where the foreign jihadis ended up running the place.

Are both sides saying “Nice doggie” while looking for rocks? Very possibly. Maybe the senior official’s statement, and even the hints in the Big Speech, are feints, designed to drive a wedge between rebel factions not so we can negotiate with one, but so that we can pick both of them off more easily. And maybe the Sunni statements are their own way of negotiating with the jihadis, warning them that they really mean it about not killing so many Iraqi civilians.

But here’s the thing: if the war is going to end at all well, it’s going to end with a deal in which a critical mass of anti-American Sunnis switch sides and turn on the al-Qaeda types. The al-Qaeda types can destabilize Iraq indefinitely so long as the Sunni elders let them. We really can’t shoot them into submission: we’ve neither the troops nor, so far, the bloody-mindedness. We could let the Shiites do it, but that is civil war, and now it’s 80s Night in Iraq with the sides switched around and that’s no good for business. And if your aim is to convince the region that democracy sure is swell, a civil war in your hothouse republic will put the neighbors off representative government for decades.

So if the war is going to end at all well, the US and its Shiite and Kurd allies have to offer some inducements along with the punishments. US withdrawal is the biggest inducement of all. I suspect the actual strategy is to dangle the possibility and hope that the right number of Sunnis can be convinced to change their minds about an American presence. The straight protection racket/good cop-bad cop approach might work here: We’re the only thing standing between you and the Badr Brigades, fellas. But yes, for the first time, I think we really might leave, under the right combination of circumstances. The speech is consistent with the theory that we’re preparing serious peace overtures regardless.

UPDATE: Some of you automatically discount anything that appears in the Washington Times. So here’s an FT link on Sunni overtures re turning on Zarqawi and his henchmen. (Via Austin Bay via Instapundit.)