Indications that Baathist and former regime elements — long considered the primary operational planners, logisticians, and materiel smugglers of the insurgency — have paused to assess the viability of talks between the new Iraqi government and the Sunni community?whose fighters comprise the bulk of the insurgency and its societal support networks?on the enfranchisement of Sunnis into the Iraqi political structures in return for Sunni insurgent demobilization, represents an extremely important development in Iraq .

This pause may indicate growing traction and progress in a long-term strategy employed by the Iraqi government to entice the more moderate Sunni insurgent elements to abandon insurgent activity in return for political empowerment and, in so doing, isolate and degrade the remaining religious foreign fighters and the more hardcore Hussein regime elements who represent the most vicious and implacable insurgent fighters.