Iraqi Nationhood Rising

They have a lot to be proud of. Under the most brutal and vicious assault by Al Qaeda and various terror groups the people of Iraq were massacred and tortured on a horrendous scale. After all was said and done they consistently emerged stronger and better positioned for the future.

DHULUIYA, Iraq — Iraqi politics has a new catch phrase, the “yes we can” of the country’s coming parliamentary elections. It is “national unity,” and while skepticism abounds, it could well signal the decline of the religious and sectarian parties that have fractured Iraq since 2003.

Across the political spectrum — Sunni and Shiite, secular and Islamic — party leaders have jettisoned explicit appeals to their traditional followers and are now scrambling to reach across ethnic or sectarian lines. In some cases, the shift is nothing less than extraordinary.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite whose party has deep Islamic roots, has enlisted support from Sunni tribal leaders in areas that once were — and might again be — the heartland of opposition to the central government.

Here in Dhuluiya, a lush town nestled in a bend of the Tigris River, a fiery Sunni cleric who waged war against American and Iraqi forces, openly courts an alliance with Mr. Maliki, saying that the time of religious parties in Iraq has passed. The cleric, Mullah Nadhim Khalil al-Jubori, said Iraq’s future now rested with secular political parties.“It would be ironic,” he said of his own evolution in an interview at his home, “if it were somewhere other than Iraq.”

With the elections only four months away, the emergence of national unity as a theme has been welcomed by Iraqis and by American officials, who fear that identity politics in Iraq will only worsen tensions and risk a return to sectarian bloodshed.

Some go so far as say the elections could reinforce a greater sense of Iraqi citizenship and nationalism out of the chaos of the war.

Is it redundant to point out that Biden wanted to partition the country?