Recently, I posted some commentary on the idea of talking to elements of the Iraqi insurgency with a view towards offering amnesties for purely nationalist insurgents and thus splitting them away from the hardline religious extremists. I said that doing this was a good idea which had been done with effect in the past and gave the example of the state of Israel as an ally who grew out of a violent anti-British resistance movement. I said that offering such amnesties should already have been done and that it was lax of the powers that be to not have done so yet.
Well, now from the London Sunday Times comes news that talks have already been taking place in a very low-key way. The report was confirmed by Donald Rumsfeld on a Sunday talk show and he even suggested that there have been more meetings than the Times reported.
And you know what? I don't care whether it was General Abizaid, Rummie, President Bush or Grand Vizier Rove himself who had the idea. It was a good one.
I'm certain the military and the Iraqi government will continue to pursue this avenue. It gives the best hope of drastically reducing the insurgency and bringing many who have merely fought for what they see as their national integrity back into the political mainstream. There seems to have been little progress as yet though maybe because, as is common in such situations, someone has to blink first.
The Iraqis had agreed beforehand to focus on their main demand, “a guaranteed timetable of American withdrawal from Iraq”, the source said. “We told them it did not matter whether we are talking about one year or a five-year plan but that we insisted on having a timetable nonetheless.”
The demand did not meet with a favourable response from the American team, perhaps because a timetable is the one thing that President George W Bush has declared he will not agree to.
So maybe it is significant that after all the talk of "no timetables" that a timetable is pretty much what Rumsfeld gave today:
"Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years," Rumsfeld said on "Fox News Sunday."
"Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency," he said.
And General Abizaid told CBS' "Face the Nation." that Iraqi security forces would take the lead in fighting insurgents by next spring or summer. "That doesn't mean that I'm saying we'll come home by then," Abizaid said.
All pretty vague, but between 2 and 12 years of further active involvement. Probably less than 12, because it sounds like the plan is to renege on the rhetoric and leave the Iraqi security forces to fight alone at the ealiest opportunity.
Still and all, it is movement in two important directions. Negotiation was always going to be a better course than trying to kill every insurgent as I explained last year, and a timetable, however vague in public, can perhaps be firmed up in private and offer a very real chance of those negotiations being successful. While Bush keeps up the rhetoric which keeps the extreme rightwing cheerleading, it looks like his defense staff are quietly going about making him a liar.
Next, it would be handy if someone in the administration would make it clear whether permanent bases in Iraq are planned for a small amount of troops even were the bulk of Coalition forces eventually withdrawn. Even if they were, if the US forces are not visible then negotiations might still work out. If no-one can give the nationalist insurgency anything to grab onto here then the US will be playing Syria and the Iraqi government will fill the Lebanon role, in which case a political solution becomes very, very much harder.
Still, there's a glimmer of light here, no matter what the thoughtless may cry about "negotiating with murderers of Americans".
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