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Reconciliation is Not a Requirement for Peace. 

I’ve been seeing this meme for several days now, ever since it started coming out that we were actually winning, militarily, in Iraq.  I guess I’m a little surprised that the comments are coming from this source [1], but I’ll let it go except to comment.

AP’s John Burns [2] left his “base” in Washington for a two week tour of Iraq and pronounces the Surge a great success. The all-important political reconciliation, on the other hand ….

The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.

In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it’s apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year. It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory. Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again. It’s been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and—more importantly at this juncture—able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement—evenhandedness and reliability—that is furthest from being fulfilled.

There is no magic formula for success. And magic is what it may take to turn military gains into the strategy’s ultimate goal: a political process that moves Iraq’s rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from the brink of civil war to the threshold of peace—and to get there on a timetable that takes account of growing war fatigue in the United States.

Efforts at Iraqi reconciliation saw another blow Monday: Five Cabinet ministers loyal to Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein leader decided to boycott government meetings, further deepening a crisis that threatens Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The boycott would leave the Shiite-led government with no Sunni participants, at least temporarily.

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying—to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security. The idea, after all, is not to kill or capture every terrorist and insurgent. That can’t be done. The idea is to create a security environment more favorable to political action by the government, to provide breathing space for leaders of rival factions to work out a peaceful way to share power.

That’s the hope we all share. It’s increasingly hard to believe there’s much reason for it, given the incompetence of the Maliki government and the lack of better alternatives.

And second: Would Iraqi political leaders be more likely to settle their sectarian differences if they knew that America’s patience was ending and that its troops were leaving—at least the combat forces?

The second question is pure conjecture, although it depends on what one means by “settle.” My strong guess is that post-intervention Iraq would quickly explode into full-on civil war, eventually resulting in multiple mini-states. And the process may well be accompanied by direct or proxy wars involving Iraq’s neighbors.

OK I admit it, i.e. edited out a few points that I want to comment on.  I will tell you should go and RTWT, to get a better feel for his comments and mine.

There are many from center to left, who have been banging the drum up on this “military victory means nothing without reconciliation” business for some time now, and the volume on that has been cranked up significantly since the meme about how we were losing the Iraq war militarily, has been discredited, and summarily dumped.

The fact, however, is that full reconciliation is an impossible standard to meet, in any event, regardless of how the military play works out.  That’s not just the rule in Iraq, or Afghanistan, but any war.  There are always a large number of holdouts at the end of any war.  Always has been.  Regardless of where these events occur.  Regardless of the cultural influences involved.

Some extreme examples would be the partitioning in response to communist expansionism: Korea, Vietnam, Germany, and so on.  Even within the region, the religious and ethnic tensions have been going on literally for thousands of years.  Yet, while their frequency has been larger than some other areas of the world, still, wars have been relatively infrequent.  Certainly, their differences were not reconciled through that period.

I submit, that the question is not full reconciliation, but rather the question is whether or not the Iraqi government is capable of maintaining the peace.  Certainly, that has been the major issue in any other war we have ever fought in.  Those are two completely different issues.  Maintaining the peace, is not dependent on full reconciliation.

Frankly, I have begun to think that this call for full reconciliation, being the conditioned upon which victory stands, is just another attempt by the left to declare Iraq a failure.  Nothing else has worked to so label it, so far.

Here it is, my freinds;

Reconciliation is a nice to have, not a necessity.  What is a necessity for peace, is winning the war, and defeating the enemy.  Peace is secondary to winning the war, foreign is a direct product of it.   Reconciliation, in large part, comes from taking away the enemies willingness to fight.