Decius wrote:

Seven of the most important Sunni-led insurgent organisations fighting the US occupation in Iraq have agreed to form a public political alliance with the aim of preparing for negotiations in advance of an American withdrawal, their leaders have told the Guardian.

Congradulations Congress... The result of all this ineffectual pre-election grandstanding you've been doing this week is that the Sunni insurgency, who boycotted the elections a few years back, just declared victory. Anyone got any links on what, exactly, their problem is with the democratic government?

From the article it looks a lot like the Sunni's are morphing into something like an IRA/Sinn Fein situation with political and paramilitary wings.

And if you need links you really haven't been paying attention, but I'll give you a quick summary. The Sunnis mostly live in western Iraq, and the Ba'athists were mostly Sunni. They saw the new government as something that was default going to be opposed to them (a very rough population breakdown is 50-60% Shia, 20-25% Sunni, 20-25% Kurd) simply based on the numbers. Because they were also in control of much of the country under Saddam, they were expecting reprisals from the Shiite's and Kurds.

Put another way, they saw what was coming and liked it about as much as blacks would have liked the 3/5 compromise in the Constitution.

And since you've conflated multiple issues here that have nothing to do with each other, how about moving the congressional grandstanding thread someplace else? And if you can explain what the hell that has to do with the Sunnis going political instead of blowing things up, I'd love to hear where that comes from.

RE: Insurgents form political front to plan for US pullout