Iraq's fitful improvement.

It is certainly not a case of "mission accomplished." And the progress in the Iraq war, such as it is and such as it might become, will not be marked by trumpets and drums. This is the kind of progress that chastens rather than exhilarates. At least it should chasten--not only the opponents of American policy in historic Mesopotamia but also its proponents. One should not enter a military conflict, especially one in the Middle East, buttressed more by bravado than by strategic intelligence, which must include an understanding of the accumulated reciprocal hatreds of the peoples on the ground. Has that lesson really been learned? Maybe. But one fact is clear: This is no longer George W. Bush's war, and he has had the small decency to limit his crowing over the battles and skirmishes won by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.These have not been small battles or skirmishes without great valence. After all, beginning (if you want a precise date) with the firebombing by Al Qaeda of the Al Askari Mosque, one of the holiest Shia shrines in the region with its mystic ties to Imam Ali Al Hadi, on February 22, 2006, Iraq descended into an inferno of sectarian cleansing. Day after day, casualties would mount, Sunni for Shia, Shia for Sunni, leaving rivers of blood and decapitated heads as evidence of the utter hopelessness of the situation. And more: American casualties mounted and mounted daily; the coalition of the willing dismembered itself, Britain, Poland, Denmark. All that might be left would be a declining number of American troops and the ragtag militias of the Iraqi rumps that form what some people called a government. There was a time when despair choked the president's political allies, and Republican stalwarts disbursed to tactical dissents from their commander-in- chief. Surely, it must have occurred to Bush that he might save his place in history and his party's place in politics by acknowledging defeat. The sectarianism of Iraq was a phenomenon wholly unlike that which we experience here, too relentless, not at all forgiving. Dogmas without mercy, almost without a recognizable God. "We await the orders of our preachers," as The Washington Post reported young men in Baghdad insisting on the day the gilded dome collapsed. This played to the worst instincts of the Democrats. They did not--heaven forbid!--actually root for our Iraqi opponents. But many of them relished the fact that Bush had been trapped in his own rhetoric and his disinterest in details, his allergy to facts. More to the point, this encouraged the stubborn isolationist strain in the party and its companion idea, that every wrong, if you are somehow forced to pay attention, could be righted by diplomacy, the diplomacy that, sotto voce, puts China and Russia in charge of the destiny of all. In any case, read the Democratic subtext: We had riled up, virtually everywhere, Muslim passions that we didn't understand, and so we'd better manifest goodwill lest we be caught up in endless war. In the meantime, facts on the ground were actually changing in Iraq. The pacification of Anbar is easy to belittle. Largely Sunni, it only has 5 percent of the country's population. But it is 30 percent of its geography: not a small territory to have neutralized. More important is the struggle between the two Muslim sects for whom the war had been the climax of centuries of inter- religious fratricide. For the moment, at least, in what surely is a measure of realism for the players, they seem to be looking for a way out of the macabre passions that leave children without parents and parents without children. The Al Qaeda madness seems to have impressed itself as just that on the mass of Sunnis whose protector Osama's allies purported to be. The Sunnis appear to have come to their senses. Their centuries of domination have come to an end. Not even James Baker and Lee Hamilton's "study group," authoritative though it pretended to be, could convince the American polity that dominion in Iraq belonged to the Sunnis. Will it be difficult for the Sunnis not to rule the Iraqi roost? For sure. Will it be an alien experience for the Saudis? Probably. Let's leave it as the fruits of a certain inevitability. The fact is that there will be no Sunni-dominated regime on Iraq again, none. This is a historic turning point, but the Shia politicians and tribal chieftains have left the Sunnis overrepresented both in government and the army. And overrepresented also in what is a most significant determinant of behavior in the Arab world: access to the spoils. Not a bad result for a sect tied by axiomatic fidelity to Saddam and by association with Al Qaeda, both ruthless traffickers in other people's lives. The fact is that the Shia elders did not stop the Mahdi Army from taking its relentless historic revenge on the Sunnis, and perhaps they really couldn't. The clerics of the Supreme Council and especially the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani despised Moqtada Al Sadr. But he enthralled supporters, many of them committed cutthroats who had practiced their trade as killers in the Fedayeen Saddam. Sadr's day, at least for the present, seems to have come to dusk. This leaves the Shia to their political destiny waiting to happen. Maybe it will be responsible government. And what of Iran's influence? Another question, also not so easily answered. But not so predictably gloomy as to panic. The Kurdish element in this triad has a romantic theme to it. The Kurds are the ones on whom dreamers here and there want to bestow statehood. For years, it was my favorite lost cause. But the stars are fatally aligned against a Kurdish state, and the other stars--the ones from Hollywood and the Quatrieme and Holland Park--have different favorites: Tibet, for example, and Palestine. (Why the Palestinians, with the blood-thirstiness in their struggle for statehood, and not the ancient Kurds? History is not just, and politics less so. ) First, there is the historic enmity of the Turks and the Persians, who fear the contagion of Kurdish nationalism in their own borders. Second, the Kurds have no money. Third, they possess a subsidized autonomy which Baghdad also requires and the United States supports--and tamps down the urgency of statehood. Still, in a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, the president, the army chief of staff, and the foreign minister are all Kurds. As it happens, the government of Nouri Al Maliki turns out not to be as weak as it was imagined. Or as weak as it actually was. Maliki, for all his faults, presided over Iraq as it opened the doors and the spigots to the tribal chieftains who are the residual cement of Arab societies. Cash may not be a stable ballast for society. But it has a chance when it staves off the random murder of innocents. And when it leaves certain antique social structures intact. Yes, yes, some of the more candid Democrats admit. The situation has changed in Iraq. But the changes have not produced political reconciliation. In what world do these people live and about what world do they think we are talking? Is there "political reconciliation" in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia, almost anywhere in the Arab world, let alone in the holy of holies, Palestine? Still, one index of reconciliation is the mass return of Sunni refugees to a country whose governance is now in the hands of the other Islam. A realistic understanding of success, therefore, hardly places us outside the realm of the achievable. I do not have exceptional expectations for Iraq, and I'm not about to declare victory. But of this I am sure: The situation has changed there in ways that only a small number of people imagined.

By Martin Peretz