Time Magazine is reporting that there are back channel talks underway between
Iraqi insurgents and the US military.
The secret meeting is taking place in the bowels of a facility in Baghdad, a cavernous, heavily guarded building in the U.S.-controlled green zone. The Iraqi negotiator, a middle-aged former member of Saddam Hussein's regime and the senior representative of the self-described nationalist insurgency, sits on one side of the table.
He is here to talk to two members of the U.S. military. One of them, an officer, takes notes during the meeting. The other, dressed in civilian clothes, listens as the Iraqi outlines a list of demands the U.S. must satisfy before the insurgents stop fighting. The parties trade boilerplate complaints: the U.S. officer presses the Iraqi for names of other insurgent leaders; the Iraqi says the newly elected Shi'a-dominated government is being controlled by Iran. The discussion does not go beyond generalities, but both sides know what's behind the coded language.
The Iraqi's very presence conveys a message: Members of the insurgency are open to negotiating an end to their struggle with the U.S. "We are ready," he says before leaving, "to work with you."
In that guarded pledge may lie the first sign that after nearly two years of fighting, parts of the insurgency in Iraq are prepared to talk and move toward putting away their arms—and the U.S. is willing to listen...
The hopefulness of the piece has a near surreality to when juxtaposed against the backdrop situation that we have been treated to this week in Iraq. Over the past two days of the Ashura Shi'ite holiday, 91 dead Iraqis have been killed in suicide bombings.
The happy talk demonstrated in that piece, and that which we get daily at White House and Pentagon press briefings, and its pointed opposition to the reality we are experiencing every day on TV in Iraq put me in mind of a couple of documentaries I watched recently. One is "Fog of War", the brilliant recent film featuring a long set of interviews with Robert MacNamara. The film's wonderful score and stirringly symbolic footage give a rich texture to the fascinating points MacNamara makes during the film. Specifically, MacNamara discusses the fact that ideas like justice and legality tend to be defined by the winning side in warfare. He points out his belief that had we lost the Second World War, we could have been prosecuted as war criminals for the policy of fire bombing we conduced during the campaign against the Japanese mainland--the mindboggling casualty rates we inflicted on them.
What really struck me, however, was just how oddly similar MacNamara's press briefings sounded to those Rumsfeld so often conducts--almost down to the point of having similar rhetorical cadence. Part of that is that they come from very nearly the same era, but there was something more to it. There is this almost comical determination to put a bright face on the growing specter of reality.
I, of course, don't believe the administration, specifically Rumsfeld--like the Johnson administration that preceded it--has been fully honest or forthcoming with the American people. But I also think that neither they nor we fully understand just how big a thing we've got ourselves into, nor how much effort it may take to extract ourselves from it. America is a fundamentally optimistic country. But that very optimistic, though responsible for our successes, has often been responsible for our failures, also, as Vietnam demonstrates.
In thinking about the amount of dedication something like suicide bombing requires, I couldn't help think of the determination of the old Confederacy during our own Civil War. I've been watching the Ken Burns' famous early 90's ten hour documentary of the Civil War lately and what has really stuck out to me was how these people held on to the bitter end. With their economy in shambles, poverty rampant, their young men dying by the hundreds of thousands, and Northern armies marching across Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina, leaving destruction in their wake, still the confederacy hung on.
It was both sad and pathetic. And yet here we are again, 140 years later, hoping that it won't be the same in Iraq. These people are willing to commit suicide for this cause, and yet everyone in the press and the administration hopes against hope that somehow, some way, it will all just go away.
Well, here's hoping.