[Skybird]

First printed in the NYT:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...518631,00.html

(...)
At one level, I just don't get it. It's clear that the surge by US troops has really dampened violence in Iraq. So don't we now need a surge in diplomacy to finish the job?
It often feels to me as if Secretary Rice just wants to keep Iraq at arm's length and hope that it will somehow end up on someone else's report card.
(...)
I say to myself: "Maybe you're missing something that Secretary Rice knows -- that there isn't going to be any formal political reconciliation moment in Iraq, grand bargain or White House signing ceremony. The surge has made Iraq safe, not for formal political reconciliation yet, but safe for an 'A.T.M. peace.' "
(...)
Michael Gordon, The Times's top military expert, whose history of the Iraq war, "Cobra II," is one of the best books on the subject, said the phrase circulating in the military lately to describe the situation evolving in Iraq is "accommodation without reconciliation." The various parties basically accept the new imbalance of power -- Shiites on top, but allowing the Kurds and Sunnis to have a share -- and the political struggle continues with lower levels of violence.
(...)
maybe the question we need to start asking is not: When do Iraqis reach a formal internal peace so we can go? But rather: Can the informal arrangements they're cobbling together reach a level of stability that would enable a major drawdown of US forces next year?
(...)
Right now what is indisputable is that we are seeing the first crack in years in a wall of pessimism that has been the Iraq story. It is only a crack, but it creates new possibilities. It would be reckless to ignore or exaggerate.
(...)
I went to a source I knew I could trust -- my colleague James Glanz, The Times's Baghdad bureau chief who has lived through so much craziness there: "There is a sense of quiet on the streets that we have not seen for a long time in Baghdad," he told me, "but there is also a big question mark in the shadows of every alley. We don't know what is lurking back there, but we suspect, and evidence suggests, that it is the same set of problems that were always there."