Straining to be optimistic

If there is one positive in Iraq, it's the existence of great potential wealth. Before Saddam got into a war with Iran, Iraq was rich, secular, and if you weren't on Saddam's enemies list, not a bad place to live. More so if you were a Sunni arab, but not bad overall.

What it will take is for the Shiites and especially the Kurds to conclude that there will be enough more wealth in a peaceful Iraq that it can be shared with the Sunnis. The task of the Sunnis is to convince them, through violence, that it's more profitable to share. The insurgency is not irrational. Mao expressed it when he said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The fly in the ointment is that the Kurds may be so disaffected from Iraq that they are not prepared to do anything to preserve it. They may relish the prospect of retaking Kirkuk and whacking a few Baathist remnants in the process. Furthermore, if they have their own army, police, laws, and oil revenues, as the new constitutions guarantees them, the Sunnis may not believe a word they say even if they sound conciliatory.

It's hard to see why it would happen now if it didn't happen during the summer, but the Kurds might say to the Sunnis, "We didn't really mean that part in the constitution about Kirkuk being Kurdish. Let's split it." From there, who knows where it might go. That's as optimistic as I can get.