NYT, "Talking With Iraqi Insurgents".

[necso]

"It is a measure of how far Washington has scaled down its expectations on Iraq that this week's most encouraging news consisted of some highly tentative feelers for direct talks between the armed Shiite parties that dominate Iraq's government and some of the armed Sunni insurgent groups that have been fighting it.

...

One big issue is amnesty. Insurgent groups are unlikely to agree to lay down their arms without some assurances of amnesty for their fighters. Yet the Iraqi government talks about denying amnesty to insurgents who have killed other Iraqis, and Washington has insisted on excluding those who have killed Americans. That is understandable on both counts, but it would seem to leave few, if any, real insurgents eligible for any amnesty.

There is also the question of dropping employment restrictions and other penalties against all but the highest echelons of former Baath Party members — those with direct responsibility for the major crimes of the Saddam Hussein era. For most of the rest, party membership was often a condition for employment, promotion and, in some cases, survival. But many Shiites and Kurds, who suffered systematic discrimination under Baath rule, want to penalize even lower-level Baathists.

Any reconciliation broad enough to matter will require embracing unsavory people and forgiving unsavory deeds. That won't be pretty or popular. But it is Iraq's best remaining hope for peace, reconstruction and national survival."

This is, I think, a courageous piece by the Times (the war, and the mere mention of amnesty, have been hyper-politicized by the neocons), and it comes at a time when the neocons in Congress are about to have their little fling at crushing the last vestiges of a free press in this country. (But what else is to be expected from these criminals, whose fear of having their multitudinous crimes exposed drives them to desperate ruthlessness and new lows of transparent fascism, faux-nationalism and faux-patriotism.)

It can reasonably be expected that if the (Iraqi Arab) Sunni "insurgents" are to brought around to peacefully accept the new state of affairs (with the attendant loss of much of their former independence, power and control), then they'll have to be given certain assurances and tokens of good faith, and meaningful negotiations will have to be entered into (ie, neocon-style "negotiations" won't do).

Whether any of this is remotely possible is another matter.