Word: anbar
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...limited has progress been on the political front that the prime achievement the Bush Administration has been touting is the alliance the U.S. has struck up with Sunni tribal sheikhs in Anbar province against al-Qaeda. This is certainly an important tactical advance in confronting the jihadists in Iraq - although it's not entirely clear whether the greater shift has come from the sheikhs (long a backbone of both the Saddam regime and then of the insurgency), or from the U.S. in finally recognizing that the Ba'athists were open to cooperation against al-Qaeda. Although the fighters represented...
...groups with which the U.S. is cooperating in Anbar are not only outside of the Iraqi government; they are actively opposed to it, seeing it as a Shi'ite entity beholden to Iran. Such cooperation helps deal with the problem of al-Qaeda in Iraq - a brutal presence, to be sure, but still a minority element in the overall Sunni insurgency - but it doesn't necessarily reinforce national reconciliation...
...Capt. Travis Patriquin, the military's tribal liaison for the area. Patriquin and Sattar had worked closely together late last year, when Sattar first emerged as the leader of a band of tribes around Ramadi coming together to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sattar, like other tribal leaders of Anbar Province, had fallen out with al-Qaeda in Iraq after years of complacency and cooperation with insurgents targeting U.S. forces. The longtime pact between tribal leaders and insurgents in Anbar Province had broken down around Ramadi amid squabbling over money, essentially. When insurgents began raiding highways in Sattar's territory...
...loyal to him killed off and drove out insurgents from Ramadi, where al-Qaeda in Iraq had established a headquarters of sorts in the rubble of a city shattered by years of intermittent fighting. As of the summer of 2007, U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington were publicly claiming Anbar Province had gone from a lost cause to a success model...
...encouraging. Washington has blown hot and cold this summer about the wisdom of sticking with what the Government Accountability Office called the "dysfunctional" al-Maliki's government. The current wind is marginally positive, but it was hard to miss the way Bush summoned the entire Iraqi A-team to Anbar during his surprise visit to press them to move faster. Iraqis tell Time, however, that it doesn't really matter if al-Maliki stays or leaves. As long as the current cast of dubious and discredited characters continues to dominate Iraqi politics, reconciliation is not going to happen. None...