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Sooner or later, the Sunni's will figure out that the US is not leaving as long as the insurgents are there.

Dead on. My thoughts exactly. "Toughing it out," despite turn and run Dems, is beginning to pay off.

Post-Clinton's-Sumalia disaster, and after W's Dad promised support to toss out Saddam (and we left), these people are waiting to see if America has a backbone and some nards. We are proving that we mean what we say, and we say we aren't bailing, we aren't leaving, we aren't "issuing a printed withdrawal schedule" until there's some kind of peace that can sustain itself after we go. Take that, Hillary!

"Sooner or later, the Sunni's will figure out that the US is not leaving as long as the insurgents are there. I think that their new strategy will be to go along with the US until we leave. And then they'll go back to fighting the Shi'ites."

No, the military option is the "Beggar's Choice" for the Sunni's. Sunni's are only 20% of the Iraqi populace, whereas Shi'ites are 60%. Moreover, the Shi'ites control half of Iraq's oil (the Kurds control the other half)...and in addition, the Shi'ites and Kurds have foreign backing from various nearby states.

What the Sunnis did was to make an extremely bad choice for their long-term survival...probably because they feared losing their positions of wealth and influence that they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein...which made them see the U.S. as their enemy.

But that unintellectual thought process has got them fighting Kurds and Shi'ites (i.e. 80% of the Iraqi population) as well as the U.S. military...it's got them missing out on the level of U.S. funded reconstruction that the rest of Iraq is enjoying...it's locked them out of the new Iraqi government's power hierarchy...and it's stuck them fighting and dying along the very Al Qaeda fanatics who **hate** the less radical Iraqi Sunni's. So it's hardly surprising that the Sunnis came around to participate in the most recent election in Iraq...that they are signing on, tribe after tribe, with either the new Iraqi government, the U.S. military coalition, or both...and that they resent the foreign military presence of Al Qaeda in their midst.

Eventually, they will figure out that the Shi'ites and Kurds (80% of Iraq) aren't simply wiping out the remaining troublesome Sunni tribes (far less than 20% of Iraq by now) **only**BECAUSE**OF**THE**US**PRESENCE**IN**IRAQ.

Now there's irony for you.

The Shi'ites and Kurds aren't engaging in wholesale genocide of Sunni's in Iraq for the simple reason that the U.S. won't permit it. Which is to say, the Sunni's have a de facto ally in the U.S. presence in Iraq...and therefor that the Sunni's have only a limited time window in which to make amends with the Shi'ites and Kurds prior to the inevitable U.S. military drawdown there.