Creating Alternative Parties
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Senator Graham should know better.
In an interview in Time magazine’s September 26 issue, the South Carolina Republican said he was giving the current Iraqi government until the end of the year to reach key political compromises.
Mr. Graham, a Republican who has been to Iraq 12 times since 2003, did not threaten to vote with Democrats to end the war as his Nebraska Republican colleague Chuck Hagel does. But he has implied that if deals were not inked on pensions and jobs for former senior Baathists, oil revenue sharing and federalism, his vote would no longer be with President Bush.
“If they can’t pull it together in the next 90 days,” he told Time, “I don’t think they are ever going to do it.” He then said that as a consequence, this politician who is up for re-election in 2008, would “openly say the chances for political reconciliation are remote.”
Ninety days? Pardon me if this recent deadline for reconciliation in the middle of a war seems as impetuous a demand as any of the prior deadlines set, none of which the current government in Baghdad could meet.
There is an important flaw with Mr. Graham’s view and for that matter most of the Washington establishment’s view of what should and should not be reconciled in Iraq. For now, a power-sharing agreement that pieces back together the coalition of political parties that won the December 2005 national elections will sabotage an already fragile government. The last thing Iraq needs is national reconciliation today — especially not between good faith political actors like the Kurds and those political parties that exist to further the interests of terrorists. Too often the war for Iraq is reduced to a struggle for power exclusively among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis. This is correct only in so far as the factions that drive the fighting, at least between the Shiite and Sunni, are incorrigible bigots who seek to cleanse discreet geographic areas.
But this overlooks the fact that nearly all the victims of the confessional violence are civilians and one never hears about how one sectarian force has captured or killed competing sectarian leaders.
In large part this is by design. Al Qaeda sought to provoke a civil war in a gambit to dominate Iraq’s Sunnis. As the late leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, said in his infamous 2004 letter to Ayman al Zawahiri, attacks on Shiite holy places, civilians, and military targets would “provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts.
If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands of these Sabeans.”
So while it is true that Al Qaeda seeks to kill the Shiites, and the Mahdi Army seeks to kill the Sunnis, they need one another to block other political options from emerging from either side’s adherence to Sharia.
For Mr. Graham, the sectarian violence continues because Iraq’s national leaders have failed to make hard choices. But the national politicians can make all the agreements they like, there will be no chance of ending the sectarian war unless both the Shiite and Sunni jihadist factions that seek perpetual sectarian war are crushed.
While there are plenty of Iraqi citizens and politicians who would like to divide up the nation’s wealth and iron out its laws through a political process, there are also parliamentarians and parties that have proven they seek to incinerate the political process, and with it most of Baghdad.
On the Sunni side, the terror bloc is composed by most of the Tawafuq slate of three fundamentalist parties that include individuals like Khalaf al Ayan who plotted terror attacks from his office inside the green zone, including what Iraqis and Americans suspect was the April suicide bombing of the parliament cafeteria. Mr. al Ayan has denied his guilt. He has also gone on satellite television and declared himself the next Saddam.
On the Shiite side, the saboteurs include the politicians loyal still to Moqtada al Sadr, who remains popular in Iraq, though not as popular as he was in 2005, and whose deputies turned Iraq’s health ministry and Baghdad’s hospitals into an instrument of ethnic cleansing by refusing to treat the Sunnis freshly wounded by Mr. Sadr’s militias.
The fact that Messrs. Sadr’s and al Ayan’s parties are boycotting Mr. Maliki’s government is a sign of progress, not stagnation. Their participation in Iraq’s vast patronage network and government did not, as President Bush once hoped, tame or modify the terror parties, but rather corrupted the national institutions that ultimately must be strong and independent enough to destroy jihadism.
While General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker did not say this directly last month, it is obvious that they too have given up hope of reaching a meaningful accord within the current government. Hence Mr. Crocker touted some of the de facto cooperation on oil profit sharing in the absence of a petroleum law.
A fruitful approach for now is to mold alternative local Shiite and Sunni parties through the tribal network that could challenge the confessional terror parties in the national elections at the end of 2009. Until those elections come, it would be wise for Mr. Graham to abandon his wish for national reconciliation and be content with the local variety.