There has long been a kind of unspoken truce that allows Democrats to control the Assembly and Republicans the Senate.
For decades, all the fiefs in Albany lived under a political truce that allowed the Democrats to have the Assembly and the Republicans to have the Senate, with the governorship up for grabs.
If evidence were needed of the failure of diplomacy, the truce that allowed Palestinians to return safely for the first time in days was the only apparent outcome from the mediation mission by US secretary of state John Kerry and UN chief Ban Ki-moon over the past week.
Unfortunately, the uneasy truce that allowed ACA to move forward to enactment is now under attack.
Defining a Military Victory But the government's successes in Basra and Sadr City were not so much victories as heavy fighting followed by truces that allowed the militias to melt away with their weapons.
In operations in Basra, Amara and the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, the Iraqi troops faced Shiite militias, and all three operations essentially ended in truces that allowed militia fighters to melt away.
The distrust between the two sides is evident: Attempts failed again today, for the third time, to set the terms of a truce that would allow the water supply to be restored to one town, Kumanovo, and for aid to reach the besieged Albanian residents of Lipkovo.
He then tasked his Central America representative, a jovial Armenian-Lebanese man named Agop Kayayan, with arranging a truce that would allow El Salvador's children to be immunized.
American troops and the cleric Moktada al-Sadr's rebel militiamen paused after eight days of fighting to allow negotiations on a truce that would end the siege of a rebel bastion in the Imam Ali mosque.
