[TIME/CNN EMPHASIS BY A NEWT ONE]

Is al-Qaeda on the Run in Iraq?
JOE KLEIN

Some 30 tribes in Al Anbar formed an alliance, the "Anbar Awakening," in
September and pledged to fight Al Qaeda militants in the insurgency-plagued
province by forming their own paramilitary units and sending recruits to the
local police force.

There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It
comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni
insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of
U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the
al-Qaeda foreign fighters.

A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming
reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days
recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks
overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one
round fired).

This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda
in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units
there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other
Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances
against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an
influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against
al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a
mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.

The good news comes with
caveats, of course. The removal of AQI's havens in Anbar may ultimately hurt the
terrorists' ability to blow up markets in Baghdad, but it hasn't yet. As I
reported in September 2005, there is also the scandalous reality that an
alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as
early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place
in the new democratic Iraq."

The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may
never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which
enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along
with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the
conditions for the current civil war. "Just because the Sunni tribesmen have
joined with us in Anbar doesn't mean they like the Baghdad government," a senior
Administration official told me. "They just hate al-Qaeda more."

Which is why there is some very bad news from Iraq as well. There is a growing sense
among senior U.S. military and intelligence officials that the government of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki—and the Shi'ite factions in general—has little
interest in making concessions to the Sunnis. "The Shi'ites suffer from a
battered-child syndrome.

They simply don't trust the Sunnis," said a senior U.S.
official. There was a long history, even before Saddam Hussein's massacres, of
Sunni prejudice and pogroms against the Shi'ites. In recent months, the
al-Maliki government has sent several clear signals of anti-Sunni intransigence.
It has supported the "voluntary" relocation of Sunni Arabs from the disputed,
Kurdish-dominated city of Kirkuk. And in an instance that is particularly vexing
to U.S. intelligence officials, al-Maliki has supported the creation of a
parallel Shi'ite-dominated intelligence service to supplant the authority of the
Iraq Intelligence Service, which has been run by a Sunni general named Mahmoud
Shahwani, who is considered "very effective" by U.S. officials.

It is beginning to seem quite implausible that the various Iraqi political factions will meet "benchmarks" like rescinding the punitive de-Baathification programs and passing a law guaranteeing fair distribution of oil profits anytime soon. And as General
David Petraeus keeps reminding us, a political solution is necessary: a military
victory is not possible.

So let's try to put the good and bad news together.
It's not impossible that the Iraqis will eventually remove the al-Qaeda cancer
from the Sunni insurgency—which would put a serious crimp in President George W.
Bush's current rationale for the war, that we're there to fight al-Qaeda. But
it's also probable that without a political deal, the sectarian conflict between
the Sunnis and Shi'ites will intensify—and eventually explode when the U.S.
military pulls back from Iraq.

The stakes in Iraq then become questions of moral
responsibility and regional stability. "How many Srebrenicas do you have the
stomach for?" a senior U.S. official asked me, referring to the Bosnian massacre
by the Serbs in 1995. Given the antipathy of the American people for the war,
I'd guess the public reaction would be, "Those Arabs are just a bunch of
barbarians, and we could never tell the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis
anyway." A more pointed question is, How many massacres of Sunnis will the
Saudis and Jordanians have the stomach for? How hard will Iran press its obvious
advantage with a Shi'ite-dominated government in Iraq? The answers to those
questions are completely out of American hands. They rest with the Iraqi
Shi'ites. Eventually even battered children have to grow up.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Didn't we tell ya so?
This surge is a success!