Word: sunnis
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...take a minute, I'd like to discuss what a national-unity government would mean. What are the forces that should constitute this government? On that, there is broad agreement -not unanimous, but broad agreement - that it should be formed from the Shi'ite alliance, the Kurdish alliance, the Sunni Arab alliance and across sectarian groups, [the secular block] led by Iyad Allawi. The second issue is that there has to be a process for decision-making in which these forces could participate and that's important for a variety of reasons. There is a strong polarization along ethnic...
...third element is a common program. You don't want a government where two ministries run according to policies of Sunni Arabs, three according to the policies of the Shi'ites, and so on. So there has to be a program that allows for governing from the center...
...make the good feelings last. Each side wants him to go to bat for it but suspects him of secretly playing for the other team. "They see everything very much in a zero-sum way," Khalilzad says. That he is of mixed parentage--his late father was a Sunni, his late mother a Shi'ite--doesn't automatically make him a neutral in the eyes of Iraqi politicians. As a representative of the country that smashed the Sunnis' stranglehold on power, he worked hard to overcome their suspicion, only to find himself in the doghouse with the Shi'ites...
...ITES ALWAYS SEE THEMSELVES AS THE victims," Khalilzad says as his convoy pulls up to the U.S. embassy, temporarily housed in what used to be Saddam Hussein's main palace. But Sunnis too are adept at the politics of victimhood. Later in the day, the ambassador holds a closed-door meeting in his small office with two representatives of the Sunni parties. One of them, Iyad al-Samarrai, then told TIME they asked Khalilzad to have U.S. forces stop the killing of Sunnis by Shi'ite death squads...
Such a request only highlights that Khalilzad has little influence on the forces driving the war. For all his success at bringing Sunni political groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces...