Perhaps we are looking at the beginning of the end game in Iraq.
U.S. officials have met figures from some Sunni Arab insurgent groups but have so far not received any commitment for them to lay down their arms, Western diplomats in Baghdad and neighboring Jordan said Wednesday.
[…]
The meetings, described as being in the initial stage, have not included members of al-Qaida in Iraq or like-minded religious extremists, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Contacts have taken place in western Iraq, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, according to two diplomats based in the Jordanian capital, Amman. One of them said talks might shift to Egypt “at some point.”
U.S. officials have said establishing a dialogue with the insurgents was difficult because of the lack of a unified command structure among the various groups and the absence of a leadership capable of speaking for most of them.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the United States is involved in talks on promoting Iraq’s political process with “all sorts of groups,” but declined to say if any insurgents were among them.
However, a Western diplomat in Baghdad who is familiar with the dialogue said the U.S. was reaching out to “Sunni Arab nationalists” and “some Islamists from the Shiite and Sunni sides,” many of whom have grievances about jobs and reconstruction money.
“We hear all the time that they are interested in coming in but we haven’t seen signs,” the diplomat said. “We want to see attacks stopped. The question is, can they help end the violence if they want to join.”
Please note that I am not saying that success in Iraq is close or even a certainty. That would be quite a statement in the face of political scene where the likes of Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan have their words and deeds selectively reported and the doom-laden calls for retreat by Congressman Murtha (D-Penn.) are trumpeted while the pronouncements of progress by Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) barely register a blip on the radar.
That said, this may be the first step in seperating the men from the boys … errr … the actual Iraqi insurgents from the radical Islamist terrorist bastards. Realize that the domestic Iraqi holdouts have witnessed large parts of their homeland enthusiastically embracing democracy and have become disgusted with their supposed Islamist terrorist allies’ tactics of murderously targeting innocent Iraqi civilians. Oh yeah, they have also seen a lot of their insurgent brethren getting shredded by Coalition troops they cannot truly engage, as well as improving and growing Iraqi security forces. With a wedge already developing between the insurgent and terrorist facets of our enemies in Iraq, it is only sensible that the U.S. would work to further drive home that wedge in the hopes of reducing our opponents by means other than bullets. While it is at yet uncertain any benefit for the Iraqi people and the Coalition will come from these efforts, certainly there is no foreseeable harm in the maneuver.
If Iraq can actually come to grips with its domestic insurgents, embracing them and isolating the truly blood-craved Islamist terrorists, then this may indeed by the opening moves of a lengthy end game. After all, as much as the anti-war opponents and large portions of the media have tried to paint the picture of another Viet Nam, one key difference has never been overcome: the war in Nam was, post-Tet, fought primarily against a regular military of an outside force backed, supplied and heavily maintained by a global superpower. That is certainly not the case in Iraq. That has never been close to being the case in Iraq.