Americans surrender in Iraq

New York Times: Some Sunnis Hint at Peace Terms in Iraq, U.S. Says: "The Bush administration, struggling to cope with a recent intensification of insurgent violence in Iraq, has received signals from some radical Sunni Arab leaders that they would abandon fighting if the new Shiite majority government gave Sunnis a significant voice in the country's political evolution, administration officials said this week."
This, of course, is total bullshit -- neither the US military nor the embassy have any contacts with the insurgency except for the 9.000 Iraqis they have arrested and thrown into concentration camps throughout the country, without trials or hearings or habeus corpus. And, as in Guantanamo, they have no idea who most of these people are or whether they are with the insurgency or not.
So, not knowing who the insurgency is, the US in now trying to negotiate with them through the New York Times.
It's not the insurgency which is suing for peace here, it is the Bush admistration. I think this article is actually a declaration of surrender. It offers the insurgency leaders a trade-off - we'll give you political power if you will stop shooting at our troops.
As you read further down the article, the truth becomes more apparent:
-- The US has realized that their so-called anti-insurgency strategy (of capturing or killing insurgents, training more Iraqi forces, etc) is not producing results and so they now say that "quelling the insurgency would also require an effective political strategy to stabilize areas where insurgents have been most active, including Baghdad and Mosul, two of Iraq's biggest cities." In other words, surrender.
-- The problem is finding someone to negotiate surrender with: "American officials, two years into the war, acknowledge that they have little understanding of who the leaders are, apart from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and of course possibly some of those 9,000 detainees
-- So the US wants the Iraqi government to do the negotiating instead: "the United States is urging Dr. Jaafari, the new Iraqi leader, to renew talks with a coalition of Sunni Arab groups known as the National Dialogue Council, which has links to elements in the insurgency who it says are ready to explore openings toward a political settlement" even though there are "doubts that the council has the influence with the insurgents that it claims",
-- But they're having a hard time bullying the Iraqi government to not sabatoge these negotiations before they even begin: "the [National Dialogue] council's leaders have been deeply angered by raids by Iraqi forces on its Baghdad offices in the past 10 days. The raids resulted in the arrests of more than a dozen people, including some who had played a role in earlier contacts with the Shiite leaders."
-- So, even though Bush promised to stay until Iraq was stable, the US going to declare victory and leave, by blaming the continuing violence on the Iraqi government itself: "many [Sunnis] wanted to join in the political system, including the writing of a permanent constitution. But the political feuding that delayed the formation of the government for nearly three months after the elections has so far blocked the kind of concessions the Sunnis are demanding" and the article later quotes a "US military official" as saying "The Iraqis are going to have to figure this out for themselves".
And in the meantime, we're outta here!