A week after one of his top aides was forced to resign for speaking to the press about plans for a possible amnesty for insurgents, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced his actual plan to establish a framework for peace in the war-torn nation: amnesty for insurgents.

Apparently the test balloon was well received.

Amnesty for Iraqi citizens who participated in acts of violence against Iraqi and Coalition forces is offered in hopes that such a program will marginalize foreign players in the conflict. Non-Iraqi combatants - long suspected of being the operational core of the insurgency - will become strangers in a strange land should this plan take root in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Therein lies the problem. Amnesty as a form of mediation in civil and ethnic conflict is not a new concept. It's been utilized successfully to resolve conflicts and avert devastating violence in some of the most extreme situations of recent human strife. But there is a catch. The success of any amnesty is entirely dependent on the capacity and willingness of the parties involved to forgive and move on.

Those who currently man the opposition of occupation forces and the democratic regime it helped establish are not political dissidents. They are people who feel they have been wronged. Individuals who have suffered the traumas of an Abu Ghraib interrogation, or who have lost family in botched check-point inspections or neighborhood raids are not fighting for or against an ideology. They are fighting for vengeance. Acceptance and forgiveness are not in their vernacular.

Not that it matters. Whether the individual players in the insurgency choose to stop fighting and collaborating with non-Iraqi fighters is moot. Either way a solution is fast at hand for American troops.

If the amnesty is accepted, Prime Minister al-Maliki will have to convince the Iraqis to "just get along." A gambit which, if successful, would lead to the reduction of American troop levels at the request of the Iraqi people; The pre-requisite of coalition disengagement.

If the amnesty is denied, the Iraqi government - and by extension their coalition partners - will have a full-blown civil war on their hands. Not exactly a solution, but it would be an official evolution of the situation. New options would be available to the coalition. Options such as declaring the civil war an internal problem of a sovereign nation and walking out with a deal to provide funding, arms, training, and logistical support. A slight departure from the "you break it, you buy it" paradigm true, but also a plausibly dignified step toward tactical disengagement.

On the other hand a denied amnesty could lead to perpetual American involvement in the region. Imagine a Vietnam-eqse theater of operations stretching from Israel to the Himalayas where terrorists and other enemies of the "forces of freedom" are hunted by thinly stretched American forces for a generation. This prospect is not really a solution, but it might force the rest of America to wake up and smell the quagmire sooner rather than later and demand this Administration lead us out of the war they led us into.

Here's hoping this hand of Texas hold'em doesn't go in the toilet.

Labels: Abu Ghraib, insurgency, iraq, Nuri al-Maliki