The facts are these: Iraq is mostly populated by Shiites; its politics is guided by Shiites; its army is largely manned by Shiites; its marauding militias are Shiite; and it is Shiites who have cause to act vengefully after years of minority-Sunni oppression, which may be wrong and will settle nothing, but that's the way it is.
National reconciliation is an admirable goal, but so are the more achievable goals of world peace and curing the common cold. For the longest foreseeable future, reconciliation is a pipe dream. Shiites will slaughter Sunnis and Sunnis will slaughter Shiites because, specifically, of 20th-century political divides unique to Iraq, and, generally, because of a 1400-year-old dispute over the utter insubstantiality of Muhammad's line of succession that only the pompous certainty of organized religion could regard as more important than earthly peace and prosperity.
No external force can change those bleak realities of Iraqi life. Anyone foolish enough to try will only withdraw a bloody stump. But withdraw he will.
The trick, of course, is to fast forward to the inevitable withdrawal with the least possible loss of face -- and the remote has just been kindly provided by none other than Iraq's (Shiite) prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Speaking out of self-preservative political concerns, Mr. Maliki recently declared he was indeed “a friend of the United States, but not America’s man in Iraq." He has his own agenda, appropriately an Iraqi agenda, and in a Rumsfeldian huff he further declared, in effect, that foreign saviors should simply back off.
In contrast to our top military commander's estimate that 12 to 18 months are required to make Iraq's army and police forces fully and independently operational, Mr. Maliki claimed he can do it in six. No one knowledgeable believes that is realistic; still, America's response should be, "Fine. Tomorrow would be better, but we'll settle for 180 tomorrows."
In brief, the U.S. could forgo a Vietnam-style declaration of false victory in favor of a polite withdrawal at an allied government's request. The official posture: Who are we to impose our will on a sovereign friend?
Maliki's abruptness was a gift dropped in Democrats' lap. In response to the right's unrelenting "the Dems-have-no-plan" charges, they should jump on it like Bush on an unaffordable tax cut. (If the president were sensible enough to exploit it before next week's elections he'd vastly improve his odds of saving his Congressional majority, but "sensible" has never been an option threatened by Bush.)
Iraq's sad, unalterable reality -- sad because it is so unalterable -- that makes skedaddling at the drop of any flimsy excuse so preferable was underscored by the naked intransigence of a leading Shiite politician: “The [coalition] forces need to know one clear fact. Who is the real enemy here? It is the Saddamists and the [Sunni extremists].” "Clear fact" and "real enemy" aren't terms that betray much cause for optimism.
Just as sad is that the Shiite pol failed to include another apparent enemy: American soldiers -- nearly 3000 of whom have given their lives so that silly son of a bitch can stomp Sunnis. Astoundingly, the Grand Poobah of Shiites, Ali Sistani, has yet to meet with a single American official and flatly refuses to do so. Why? "Because [the Americans] are non-Muslims and thus he considers them to be kafir, or infidels."
What gratitude, what graciousness, what a flashing neon sign advertising how things are, and how they shall remain.
If nothing else, we had best leave before we ourselves aid and abet Iraq's bloodbath any further. Just as astounding as Sistani's attitude toward his liberators is that the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found "that of the 505,093 [rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles] that have been given to the Ministries of Interior and Defense over the last several years, serial numbers for only 12,128 were properly recorded."
Huge caches of our own weapons could be untraceably anywhere -- and apparently are. "While 176,866 semiautomatic pistols were purchased with American money ... more than 13,000 were unaccounted for. All 751 of the M1-F assault rifles sent to Iraq were missing, and nearly 100 MP-5 machine guns."
The mere and quaintly Peter Principle bows in admiration to superior incompetence like that.
Courtesy Prime Minister Maliki's self-satisfied confidence that he can do better than Americans -- and given our track record, his confidence is not wholly unjustified -- Democrats have been handed the best opportunity yet to propose the best of all possible withdrawals. Six months and we're gone, just like our "friends" asked.