Vice President Dick Cheney can be a persuasive speaker, as he was this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition. Maybe it’s his calm, measured tones, his reassuring style.

He told Juan Williams that the key to success in Iraq was to “get the Iraqis into the fight.�

The same is true for the entire region, he said. Terrorists want to seize control of a country to have a base from which to launch attacks. The United States needs to get Iraqis, Afghans and others to fight on our side, he said.

But there’s a problem in seeing Iraq so firmly in terms of a global battle against terrorism. It takes little account of the realities of Iraq’s own politics, the sectarian killings, the death squads.

So even as Cheney says he would have expected the level of violence to have dropped after three national elections, there’s this today from the Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — U.S. and Iraqi forces raided the stronghold of a Shiite militia led by a radical anti-American cleric in search of a death squad leader in an operation disavowed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Al-Maliki, who relies on political support from the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said the strike against a figure in al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia in Sadr City “will not be repeated.�
The defiant al-Maliki also slammed the top U.S. military and diplomatic representatives in Iraq for saying his government needed to set a timetable to curb violence in the country. At a news conference Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said al-Maliki had agreed.
“I affirm that this government represents the will of the people and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it,� al-Maliki said at a news conference.
The prime minister dismissed U.S. talk of timelines as driven by the upcoming midterm elections in the United States. “I am positive that this is not the official policy of the American government but rather a result of the ongoing election campaign. And that does not concern us much,� he said.