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Today's WaPo article about former Sunni insurgents eager to join the political process makes a nice follow-up my post about the importance of provincial elections:

The Sunni insurgent leader lifted up his T-shirt, revealing a pistol stuck in his belt, and explained to a U.S. sergeant visiting his safe house why he'd stopped attacking Americans.

"Finally, we decided to cooperate with American forces and kick al-Qaeda out and have our own country," said the tough-talking, confident 21-year-old, giving only his nom de guerre, Abu Lwat. Then he offered another motive: "In the future, we want to have someone in the government," he said, holding his cigarette with a hand missing one finger.

Abu Lwat is one of a growing number of Sunni fighters working with U.S. forces in what American officers call a last-ditch effort to gain power and legitimacy under Iraq's Shiite-dominated government. The tentative cooperation between the fighters and American forces is driven as much by political aspirations as by a rejection of the brutal methods of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, U.S. officers and onetime insurgents said.

"This is much less about al-Qaeda overstepping than about them [Sunnis] realizing that they've lost," said Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a planner for the U.S. military command in Baghdad. As a result, Sunni groups are now "desperately trying to cut deals with us," he said. "This is all about the Sunnis' 'rightful' place to rule" in a future Iraqi government, he said.

Maybe so, but I spoke to a lot of Sunnis in Fallujah who were plenty angered by al-Qaeda and the general lack of law and order; when it seems like everyone you interview has had a family member attacked, tortured, kidnapped and/or killed by extremists or criminal gangs, it's not hard to understand why ...

Abu Lwat, who fought with the 1920 group, said he had grown disillusioned after seeing his community decimated. "When first al-Qaeda got here, they called themselves the mujaheddin and said they would fight for the country. All the people liked them," Abu Lwat said. But what followed were executions and beheadings of local leaders, bans on smoking and mandatory veils for women that defied true Islamic values and "killed the life here," he said.

Whatever the primary motivation, Sunni maneuvering to enage in politics is a positive development, if a late one.

UPDATE: More on grassroots political momentum from Grim @ B5 and General Kevin Bergner:

What the general points to here are local, often tribal attempts to urge the central government in the direction of reconciliation, and to commit to reconciliation in their own areas. This is what we would call a grassroots movement, if we saw it in America. Such movements, properly organized, can become powerful even against entrenched interests willing to use violence against them -- we can look at the start of unions in America, for example.

If that proves to be the case, a grassroots movement of this type would provide very strong and stable foundation for a national political reconciliation. It is, obviously, too soon to assert that is what will happen; but it is soon enough to notice that there is movement in that direction, in many areas across Iraq.

Posted by Bill at August 9, 2007 09:39 AM | TrackBack (0)

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