One thing reading Confucius does to a person is make them aware of language and how it is used to evade responsibility or distract attention away from uncomfortable realities.  Rather like George Orwell, really.

    This comes to mind today as I peruse the stories of breakdown and chaos in US Iraq policy.  It seems that the Bush administration is falling apart, sputtering contradictions right and left.  From the midst of this mess comes this item:

The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S.
reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority
to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the
government, according to U.S. officials.

The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq
policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni
dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that
their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the
Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no
allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department
proposal.

Some insiders call the proposal the "80 percent" solution, a term
that makes other parties to the White House policy review cringe. Sunni
Arabs make up about 20 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people.

Until
now, the thrust of U.S. policy has been to build a unified government
and society out of Iraq’s three fractious communities. U.S. officials
say they would not be abandoning this goal but would instead leave
leadership of the thorny task of reconciliation to the Iraqis. The
officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive
nature of the deliberations.

      So the "outreach to Sunnis" is coming to an end and we have before us the "80 percent solution," sometimes referred to as "picking a winner."  Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it?  If 80 percent of the population gets what it wants, that’s good, right?  Speaks to the pragmatic American attraction to "the greatest good for the greatest number."  And it allows us to "pick a winner."  Great.  America loves winners.

      What does "picking a winner entail?"  It leaves open the very real possibility of the US standing back while the Shia militias and death squads bring their full fury down on Sunni insurgents.  It means standing by and watching as 20% of 26 million people (about 5.2 million people) are subjected to horrific killing and violence.  Of course the Sunni will fight back, but they will be terribly outnumbered and have nowhere to go (unless Saudi Arabia and Egypt really do come to their aid – which I tend to doubt).  So, they will die.  The "80 percent solution" will be the final solution for hundreds of thousands more people.  I

      That is what Bush’s war has accomplished.

     And there are signs that the "pick a winner" strategy has already begun (to the extent that any coherent policy moves are discernible from the fumbling Bush people).   Next week Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a major Shia leader, will be in Washington for talks (perhaps about "winning").  And even though he says the right things – that he is against sectarian killing – his political base suggests otherwise:

Al-Hakim’s SCIRI [the political party he leads] runs a militia, the Badr Brigade, that is widely
blamed for some of the sectarian killings that have been tearing Iraq
apart since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad in
February.

 It’s that old actions speak louder than words thing again…

     And to add insult to injury, Bush will meet in Washington with Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, in January.  What the scheduling of these meetings suggests is that Washington is no longer attempting to bring Shia and Sunni together: they are dealt with at separate meetings.  And that the Parliamentarian Hakim is more important to DC than the Vice President al-Hashemi.  If a were a nervous Sunni in Baghdad, I would be loading up the AK-47 because it sure looks like Bush has "picked a winner" and it is not the Sunni.

      This is a bleak picture, I  know.   I hope it is wrong.  But actions speak louder than euphemisms and the actions suggest even more terrible days for Iraq ahead.