BEIRUT — Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been hard at work on a story about Iran­ian influ­ence in Lebanon and what it means for the region, and I’ve not had much time to blog.
But this “new rec­on­cil­i­a­tion plan from Maliki”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html is inter­est­ing, to say the least. Pos­si­ble amnesty for killers of U.S. troops? No firm time-table for with­drawal, but Casey says “sig­nif­i­cant troop reduc­tions by end of 2007″:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/world/middleeast/25military.html. It will be very inter­est­ing to see how this plays out in Amer­i­can domes­tic pol­i­tics. It seems, at first blush, to hand the Democ­rats much of what they’re ask­ing for (conditions-based plan for rede­ploy­ment), but it also seems to take away the Repub­li­cans’ and George Bush’s “Dems are ‘cut-and-runners’” card. I sus­pect the GOP will do an about face, say it’s what they wanted all along and run with it.
At least, that would be the smart thing to do. What remains to be seen is whether the Sunni insur­gents will buy into this. I have a feel­ing a good por­tion will, although how sig­nif­i­cant that por­tion will be is unclear. “To those who want to rebuild our coun­try, we present an olive branch … And to those who insist on killing and ter­ror­ism, we present a fist with the power of law to pro­tect our coun­try and peo­ple,” Maliki told Par­lia­ment.
This deal has been in the works for a long time, since Novem­ber 2004, actu­ally. Michael Ware of TIME, now CNN, reported on the secret nego­ti­a­tions between the Ba’athists and the then-Allawi gov­ern­ment and the U.S. mil­i­tary com­man­ders. If Maliki is announc­ing this, there’s a fair chance that most of the kinks have been ironed out. You don’t drop this on a war-weary pub­lic if it doesn’t have a fair chance of work­ing.
This is a sketchy entry, I know, but more on this later… Dis­cuss amongst your­selves if you wish.