more war

a deep truth is that in something like the current iraq/syria disaster, all pundits and politicians look for a sentence that they can say together, each producing it like it was his/her/its own idea. right now the mechanical commonplace is that maliki, in order to get military assistance, will have to come up with a set of power-sharing political arrangements. and i agree that a pluralistic government would be desirable. but say he offers to re-write the constitution or whatever, introducing explicit power for sunnis. well, then they would have won those concessions on the battlefield, yes? and the conclusion you'd draw if you were a sunni in iraq is that if you want anything from the state or for that matter the obama admninistration, you're going to have to kill people for it. so i wouldn't see this approach, deployed right now, as a formula for anything except more war.