Over the last six months, military leaders have pointed to the success of Army Col. Sean MacFarland in negotiating with tribal leaders in Ramadi to bring relatives into the local security forces and win their support against Al Qaeda insurgents in Al Anbar province.
Kagan said commanders in Diyala, Salahuddin and Babil provinces have been working on similar deals. "The whole Anbar thing has snowballed," he said. "A lot of people want to play."
The push for smaller, local deals represents a significant shift for the Bush administration, which has emphasized that security in Baghdad has to be the top priority to allow the central government to make progress toward national political reconciliation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have pressured Iraqi political leaders to reach key agreements by the end of summer.
But Gates said last week that U.S. officials may have over-emphasized the importance of Iraq's central government.
"One of the concerns that I've had," Gates said, "was whether we had focused too much on central government construction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not enough on the cultural and historical, provincial, tribal and other entities that have played an important role in the history of both countries."
The new command has realized that there will be no quick national-level deal on the key issues, said the senior military officer in Baghdad.
"You are talking about Sunnis who had power and Shiites who have power forgetting about what happened over the last 30 years," the officer said. "How easy is that going to be?"
In Iraq, local leaders have doubts about the central government's abilities to make a meaningful deal.
"The sheiks are not waiting to see if the law is passed or not," Kagan said. "The Iraqi local leaders clearly don't see reconciliation as something that has to come from the top or necessarily should come from the top."
Military analysts have said the local deals now being forged often include bringing members of a tribe or sect into the security forces, then providing them with armored vehicles and weapons. But if the groups refuse to cooperate, military forces conduct disruptive neighborhood sweeps, raiding houses and hunting for insurgents.
Outside experts who have advised the command in Iraq have publicly called for military commanders to be more aggressive in working on deals at the local level, and to use carrots and sticks to get factions to support the American war effort.
