The Washington Post reports:

BAGHDAD, March 13 -- Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation.

When will our leaders--the ones who rightly, instinctively but still blindly wish to prosecute some kind of war on global jihad (whether they realize it or not)--even begin to consider  the terrible fact  that "the surge" as a strategy designed to trigger Iraqi "political reconciliation" is fatally flawed? The whole notion that a US military action, however skillfully accomplished, could somehow prompt fractious, sectarian and Islamic peoples to come together in what is, frankly, a Western, and for them, unprecedented mode of political comity is the height of multicultural delusion, I am sorry to say.