With all of last night's well-deserved accolades for The Hurt Locker, you might be forgiven if you forgot about Sunday's elections in Iraq, the next step forward in solidifying the government before U.S. forces begin to leave in earnest. When you have Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shi'ite leader who has alternated between cooperation and confrontation with the U.S. and Iraqi governments, telling people that “participation in the election is a sort of political resistance,” it looks like that process is being accepted as legitimate. Here is Marc Lynch on the topic: The other main headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process. The election campaign (as opposed to the results, which we still don't know) showed clearly that Iraqis are determined to seize control of their own future and make their own decisions. The U.S. ability to intervene productively has dramatically receded, as the Obama administration wisely recognizes. The election produced nothing to change the U.S. drawdown schedule, and offered little sign that Iraqis are eager to revise the SOFA or ask the U.S. to keep troops longer.
For all of the concerns progressives have over the Obama team's foreign policy -- I've written about the perils of his approach to Afghanistan here, and Adam has questioned the Democrats' narrative here -- the conflict in Iraq does seem to be winding down responsibly and on schedule. This is in large part thanks to its willingness to let Iraqi stakeholders make their own decision, as Lynch points out.
Incidentally, Lynch, along with Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah, has launched a new "channel" at Foreign Policy focused on the Middle East. Check it out. Levy and Atallah have a piece in TAP's latest issue outlining a new approach to peacemaking in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's behind the subscription wall for the time being -- you should subscribe! -- but look for it to be liberated in the next few weeks.
-- Tim Fernholz
