"Can't we all get along" in Iraq?! NO!

As the White House sounds more and more shrill each day, trying to justify the ongoing futility in Iraq, you keep hearing that we need to stay there, need to preserve the "surge" to "buy time" for the Iraqi government, such as it is, to initiate national reconciliation. Now, we've said many times before that national reconciliation is a pipe dream in a shattered fake/multiethnic state where one group was favored and the not-so-benevolent leader brutally repressed and persecuted all the others. But I don't think we have ever come across more stark evidence mitigating against any sort of agreement than that offered by Peter Galbraith in this week's New York Review. Galbraith takes as an example the proposed legislation pushed by the Bush administration allowing former members of Saddam's group, the Baath party, back into national life, making them eligible for local office, jobs, etc. This is clearly intended to bring the Sunni minority back to the fold and kill off the Sunni insurgency. Well, that might be a bit of a tough nut, to judge by the following circumstances:

"Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister—the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities."

I'm no expert in human relations or Iraq policy, but doesn't this raise just the tiniest doubt about the long-term prospects of the united Iraq for which our soldiers continue to fight, bleed, suffer grevious injuries and DIE?!