Just had a conversation with a shrewd foreign-policy hand. He had a nice formulation for the basic political situation in Iraq. He says it is characterized by the “three negatives”–the Shiites and Kurds oppose a renewed Sunni dictatorship; the Shiites and Sunnis oppose Kurdish separatism; the Kurds and Sunnis oppose a Shiite religious government. If each community accepts the basic boundaries of the three negatives, there is ample room for a political solution. The Shiites and Kurds seems to have accepted these constraints, the Sunnis haven’t yet.