“We all cheer when the swallows return to Hinckley, Ohio”

One can always count on David "Bobo" Brooks to take a modicum of fact and spin it into Republican happy talk a few degrees removed from reality.

Take this fact:

The recent violence in Basra shows how tenuous what passes for peace in Iraq really is. And William Odom, a retired three-star Army general, has spelled out just how shaky that alliance with the Sunnis is. "Our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty," Odom told the Senate Foreign Relations committee last Wednesday. He cited one estimate that the U.S. military is paying a local strongman $250,000 a day to keep the peace in a 36-square mile swath of the country. "Remember, we do not own these people, we rent them — and they can break the lease at any moment."

So, despite the tentative calm, the situation in Iraq is actually getting worse, Odom said. It has led to a proliferation of militias loyal to local warlords, who, in turn, are loyal to various political leaders. "This can hardly be called military stability, much less progress toward political consolidation," he added. "To call it fragility that needs more time to become success is to ignore its implications."

This is where a professional enabler like David Brooks comes in:

And, as one would expect, the local clans have taken control. Iraqi politics have become hyperlocalized, Colin Kahl, a Georgetown professor and Obama adviser, has observed. The most prestigious groups in Iraqi society are tribes and Awakening Councils. Many of these councils earned legitimacy by fighting during the height of the violence and have now come out in the open as local authorities.

These groups have created a fluid network of fragile truces. They squabble over money, power, ideology and sectarian issues. But they have incentives to keep the peace. Sunni leaders have come to realize that they can’t win a civil war against the Shiites. Shiite militia leaders recognize their own prestige and power drops the more they fight.

Now THAT’S how a professional enables.

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