GET THE SUNNI CLERICS AND YOU GET THE SUNNI:

Sunnis Bargain for Iraq Role as Allawi Fades: Ascendant Shiites and Kurds hint that a deal to form a new governing coalition may exclude the U.S.-favored secular politician. (Borzou Daragahi, January 3, 2006, LA Times)

[Baha Araji, a member of the leading Shiite Muslim political bloc and a loyalist of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr,] and other negotiators from the main Shiite slate spent much of Monday night engaged in talks with the National Accordance Front, a Sunni Muslim Arab coalition led by Islamists and clerics. The president of Iraq's northern Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, embraced Sunni Arab leaders there.

The emerging political alliance lumps together Shiites, Kurds and Islamist Sunni Arabs — and excludes secular Iraqis, hard-core Sunni Arab nationalists and those sympathetic to the Baath Party of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein.

If they can wrap this up fairly quickly it's a big boost towards our drawing down.

MORE:
Sunni rights and wrongs (The New York Times, JANUARY 3, 2006)

Last month the big challenge was to encourage Sunni Arabs to vote in Iraq's parliamentary election. They did, in hearteningly high numbers. Now the challenge is to convince the Sunnis that the results, giving them only a modest minority of seats, reflect not systematic fraud, but the fact that Sunni Arabs make up only a modest minority - roughly 20 percent - of Iraq's population.

Convincing them has been no easy task, despite declarations by United Nations and other neutral observers that the elections were fair, credible and transparent. This page has emphasized the need for Iraq's majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies to be more inclusive in dealing with the Sunni Arab minority. But the other side of that coin is that the Sunnis themselves need to accept that in democracies, majorities rule, and that the special privileges they enjoyed under a succession of Sunni-dominated regimes are not a birthright.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 3, 2006 12:00 AM