Diplomacy: Top Sunni Leader To Meet With Sistani About Reconciliation

Odd that our Democratic Party and MSM (but I repeat myself) are so insistent that political reconciliation is the only way the war can be won (or at least finished) and yet I only heard of this through Drew.

Iraqi vice-president and Sunni leader Tariq al-Hashemi has held talks with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shia cleric.

The meeting came a day after Mr Hashemi published proposals that he said would help achieve reconciliation in Iraq.

The plan calls for the curbing of militias and an end to sectarianism.

...

Mr Hashemi said he had received the cleric's support, in general, for his proposals.

On Wednesday, Mr Hashemi launched what he called an Iraqi National Compact.

"The time has come to sit around the table and have a candid dialogue about key and sensitive matters," he said.

He proposed that the United Nations and the Arab League could act as guarantors of an agreement and monitor its progress.

The document calls for a blanket pardon for Iraqis who took up arms against the government and the US-led coalition in exchange for laying down their arms and joining the political process.

I like how the BBC ends the piece. Contrive a down note at all costs, lest people get the crazy idea progress is being made:

Meanwhile, the violence in Iraq appears to have intensified after a relatively quite period.

The US military has reported that 70 people have been killed in a series of attacks since Monday.

A one-week trend is trumpeted as a six-month trend is ignored. The only trends that count are spikes in violence.

I can't find the quote, but I believe George S. Patton warned about imagining the enemy as superhuman and inexhaustible. The media and left have long imagined that only America and her allies could tire, falter, and fail in this fight, while insisting -- either implicitly or quite explicitly -- that our enemies were all but Terminator-like in their undauntability and innumerability. Hydra-like, for each head we killed, two would grow back, magically.

And yet that does not appear to be the case. The Sunnis insurgents certainly seem as if they've grown tired of war, and the initial considerations of honor and absurd notions about reclaiming their state have given way to more pragmatic thinking. Even Moqtada al-Sadr's thug army seems less inclined to class directly with American forces.

War is painful and deadly. But the media's single-minded fixation on American pain and American death has obscured, to the point of invisibility, an important and quite-predictable fact: The war has been painful and deadly for our enemies as well.

As they say, wars are won through manpower, firepower, staying power, and willpower. The media and the left have been doing all they can to subvert the latter (while attempting to pass laws to restrict the first two as well). It never seems to have occurred to them that perhaps the enemy, too, may eventually flag in its staying power and willpower as well.

Or more likely it has, which makes it imperative to lose this war before the enemy surrenders.

Radio Tokyo Rose: I propose a full posthumous pardon for Tokyo Rose. At least we can say she was paid by an enemy state to which she had a familial connection to push this never-ending stream of propaganda on our troops and our nation. Our current RTR (Radio Tokyo Rose) media does this simply out of sense of "duty."

Bitch.

I like the bit where she gives away our troops' position and then chuckles, "Sorry, that's supposed to be a secret." Remind you of anyone?

posted by Ace at 02:42 PM

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