Parker, Ned, and Tom Baldwin. “Peace deal offers Iraq insurgents an amnesty.” Times online, June 23, 2006.

The Iraqi government, negotiating with resistance groups, has offered to set a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of American and other foreign troops from Iraq, as part of an agreement in which the insurgents would renounce violence and give up their weapons. The deal would also include amnesty for imprisoned members of the resistance, compensation for victims of American military attack and for Sunnis who were purged from their civil-service jobs in 2003, and a halt in American military operations against insurgents.

In the early months of the occupation, the Republican administration repeatedly declared that we would withdraw our forces as soon as a legitimate Iraqi government asked us to. We may be about to discover how empty those promises were.