The emergency political summit president Jalal Talabani called has failed. The Sunnis are still outside the government. As Kevin Drum points out:
It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it.
I wrote pretty much the same in my salad days as a blogger in 2004 when we were told how good the invasion was for the rights of Iraqi women. Even Dick Cheney in the 1990s knew that invading Iraq would lead to its destruction as a secular state:
Is the surge in Iraq succeeding? This discussion sometimes sounds like listening to a bad radio which picks up two stations at the same time. Mostly we hear the experts pontificating on the tactics and the definitions of words such as "surge", but in the background, faintly, we hear another program asking what the ultimate point of the exercise might be. What would a successful Iraq look like? Does it look like a theocracy? Or an American client-state with civil war somehow kept under wraps? And what is the price to be paid for such a success if it somehow could be achieved?
-----
Cross-posted on TAPPED.