■"The Endgame in Iraq: Will the Sunnis choose peace?" op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 28 September 2005, p. A27.

■"5 Teachers Slain In An Iraq School: Shiites Were Sought Out by Fighters, Police Said," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 27 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Half a Step Forward to Rein in Iran: Insisting on Action Is the Easy Part; Taking Action Is Hard," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 27 September 2005, p. A6.

Great piece by Tom Friedman today in the NYT. Yes, it does look a lot like a post I wrote a few days back, making all the same points, but let's not be petty because this one's written a helluva lot better than mine was. When Friedman sticks to global economics and the Middle East (especially the latter), he's a purveyor of popular understanding without parallel, and he really boils it all down in Iraq in this piece.

What he says is that the Kurds and the Shiites have basically chosen what kind of Iraq they want (loose fed), and have indicated they're willing to share oil revenues with the Sunnis who will otherwise enjoy little. Now, as Friedman writes, the Sunnis need to decide what kind of minority they want to be. But there is no question: they will never rule Iraq again.

Friedman also makes clear what most astute observers have stated: Iraq's Shiite Arabs have little intention of letting their state-within-a-state be dominated by Persian Shiites, aka the Iranians.

Best part of piece is the ending, which is almost impossible to discount:

So, folks, we are falteringin Iraq today in part because of the Bush team's incompetence, but also because of the moral vacuum in the Sunni Arab world, where the worst are engaged in murderous ethnic cleansing--and trying to stifle any prospect of democracy here--and the rest are too afraid, too weak, too lost or too anti-Shiite to do anything about it.

Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind. We must not throw more good American lives after good American lives for people who hate others more than they love their own children.

My nephew's Wisconsin National Guard unit has suffered two deaths and a severe casualty in just a month of convoy duty to date. It gets awfully tough to explain to his loved ones why we should stay in Iraq to achieve a peace between the Kurds and Shiites on one hand, and the Sunnis on the other. Given that Kurds and Shiites are more than willing to defend themselves, if given the arms, it only makes sense to reduce our presence, put our troops increasingly behind safe walls, and let the Shiites and Kurds fight their own battles.

There was never any question that some portion of the Sunnis would fight on. You can't topple a minority rule like Saddam's Iraq and not expect the long-suffering populations of the Kurds and Shiites to demand--at the very least--a political set-up that makes a return to such one-sided domination impossible. The Bush administration did indeed blow a certain historical opportunity, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's fall, to keep a large portion of the Sunnis at least non-hostile to this inevitable outcome, and in letting this insurgency blossom as it has, we set in motion some inevitable clashes within Iraq--if the Sunnis so choose this pathway.

This dynamic is very similar to the Serbs in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, where, quite frankly, we provided air cover and let the locals defend themselves for the most part. Expect a similar division of labor here--if the Sunnis don't take it upon themselves to police themselves a whole lot more on this insurgency.

Toppling Saddam was a success. Letting Kurdistan emerge in its well-developed statehood has been a huge success. Fostering a responsible Shiite emergence has also been a reasonable success. Not preventing the Sunni-based insurgency has been our big mistake. There was a transition from war to peace that we simply botched in our arrogance and our sloppiness and our years of institutional bias against such operations--so well codified in the Powell Doctrine that our military and our society celebrated and enshrined across the 1990s ("We only do war, we don't do the peace.").

At some point, we take our successes and we manage our failures to the best of our ability. Letting Kurds and Shiites do the dirty work yet to come is more than fine--if the Sunnis choose this pathway.

That doesn't mean we bring the boys home so much as it means we increasingly retreat to a pure SysAdmin role, letting the Kurds and the Shiites do their own Leviathan work, augmenting them with air power, logistics, intelligence, and command and control.

This is not failure so much as the inevitable progression for our interventions in the most intransigent Gap situations (like the Sunni regions in Iraq): go with local labor, administer the larger system, speed the killing that cannot be escaped, and stay the course as intelligently as possible.

Given that likely long-term scenario, it is even more incumbent upon America to figure out a new and better relationship with Iran.

Again, the Bush administration accomplishes much with the Big Bang, but it has to keep playing the game, not just upsetting the board every so often with a takedown. Iran is a key to that game. Tehran was always going to "win" the Iraq war. The question that remains is whether or not America is going to share in that victory, or suffer a complete shut-out.

Get back in the game, Mr. President. Get in it for real, Secretary Rice.