"To the Sunnis, the Kurds are secessionists-in-waiting, the Shiites little more than agents of Iran. To the Kurds, the Sunnis are Baathist irredentists deluded into believing their manifest destiny is to rule".
Iraqi politicians face race against U.S. restlessness "When Iraqi leaders gather this week to begin the elaborate horse-trading required to fashion a coalition government, one non-Iraqi will be very much at the table: Zalmay Khalilzad, the unabashedly hands-on U.S. ambassador here. The advice of Zal, as he is known here, will not be subtle. The United States did not expend its blood and treasure to go coy at this critical time. "A Kurdish-Shia government will not solve the problem," he said. "Iraq needs a government of national unity." In other words, it needs one including the Sunnis, whom Khalilzad has assiduously courted since his arrival last year. The Sunnis' main grouping took 44 seats in the 275-member assembly, a score suggesting nascent interest in democracy, but paling beside the 181 seats taken by Shiite and Kurdish parties, three short of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. As for the now dominant Shiites, who took 128 seats, their intermittent shorthand for the Sunnis is "the terrorists."
