A Plea For Reason

From Richard Holbrooke's letter to the President:

I urge you to lay out realistic goals, redeploy our troops and focus on the search for a political solution. We owe that to the Iraqis who welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and put their trust in us, only to find their lives in danger as a result. By a political solution, I mean something far more ambitious than current U.S. efforts aimed at improving the position of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by changing ministers or setting timelines for progress. Sen. Joe Biden and Les Gelb have advocated what they call, in a reference to the negotiations that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, a "Dayton-like" solution to the political situation -- by which they mean a looser federal structure with plenty of autonomy for each of the three main groups, and an agreement on sharing oil revenue. Your administration has dismissed these proposals out of hand, and the time lost since Gelb first presented them more
than two years ago has made them far more difficult to achieve.

Yet only two weeks ago, the Iraqi parliament took a big step toward creating more powerful regions, with an interesting proviso to delay implementation for 18 months. You could use this legislation as leverage to negotiate a peaceful arrangement for sharing power and oil revenue, while redeploying and reducing our forces in Iraq. If such an effort fails, nothing has been lost by trying.