Can Iraq be Fixed?
Politicians dance around this question, but here's the reality: It will take U.S. troops years of work, and success is hardly a sure bet
The failure to move beyond the rhetoric is part of a larger pattern. While U.S. officials have largely been pleased with Maliki's public statements, they are growing impatient waiting for him to take stronger action. Washington is counting on the Shiite prime minister's national reconciliation plan to help defuse both primary sources of violence in Iraq--the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias. "We've moved from a strategy where we thought military force would stop the violence and the political process would follow," says Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University who served as an adviser in Iraq in 2003. "We now are hoping that the political process will move enough to stop the violence."
On the Shiite side, Maliki has yet to move strongly toward dismantling the militias. He also needs to reach out to the alienated Sunni community. But the central element of the Sunni outreach has also been delayed indefinitely. In a key compromise to encourage Sunni participation in the last election, Shiite leaders promised to hold a conference as soon as the new government was formed to consider amendments to the Constitution, which was drafted almost entirely by Shiite and Kurdish politicians. Sunni leaders are looking for key concessions that could boost their level of influence in the central government. This conference, however, has fallen off the radar screen in Baghdad and will not take place until the fall, meaning it could easily stretch into next year.
It is not clear how long Iraqis will wait. "They haven't polarized to the degree that everybody feels that the only way out is through fighting," says Dana Eyre, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace who served as a U.S. adviser in Iraq. "It's like Thelma and Louise heading toward the cliff. We can see the edge, but we haven't gone over it yet."
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