ARTICLE: “Bush Pressing the Iraqis to Build A Governing Coalition Quickly,” by Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

OP-ED: “Whatever Laura’s Feeding George, Pour It On,” by Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2006, p. A10.

ARTICLE: “Insurgents Shower Iraq Police Center With Mortar Shells: A second day of intense attacks against paramilitary forces,” by Edward Wong, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

ARTICLE: “In Placid Iraqi Kurdistan, Strife to the South Elicits Little Sympathy,” by Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A12.

ARTICLE: “Basque “Fighters Set a Cease-Fire After 4 Decades: Spain Expresses Caution; After 800 Killings, ETA Says It Seeks Autonomy Using Only Politics,” by Renwick McLean, New York Times, 23 March 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “Under-pressure group left in no position for hard bargaining: The separatists have been weakned by arrests and a degree of self-government for the Basque region,” by Leslie Crawford, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 2.

INTERVIEW: “Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry: Iraq’s provinces ‘itch to exercise power,’” by Steve Negus, Financial Times, 23 March 2006, p. 6.

Bush continues his blind optimism tour, which gets better by the stop as he’s forced to answer more questions more realistically. He finally seems willing, as Henninger points out, to prepare the American public for realistic outcomes.

Here’s my definition of realism on Iraq: it would include fairly autonomous and successful nations arising in the Kurdish and Shiite portions and the Sunni triangle remaining a mid-90s-Bosnia-like mess for years on end.

To me, that’s two out of three, and having Saddam gone and triggering the amazing amount of political and economic change in the region over the past three years--that works out fairly well in terms of the sacrifices made.

I wish we could fight wars where we just got to crush traditionally arrayed enemies and then feel no responsibility for the aftermath. I just don’t think history or al Qaeda or the radical Salafis are going to give us those fights in the future. So I think we’ll just have to get better at counter-insurgency specifically, and postconflict stabilization and reconstruction ops in general, getting so good at them that we bring some serious USG assets to the real great power competition of the 21st century: shrinking the Gap by making markets there.

Definitely a long haul. Look at ETA in Spain: four decades of killing. What beats them? A war of attrition agains the leadership, increased local automony for political groups/entities/regions, and an improved economy that seduces angry young men with jobs and the promise of better lives.

So another 4GW force bites the dust!

So what will work in Iraq? The same damn things. We need to make FDI flow to generate local jobs. We need to accept that Iraq will be a weak federal state (or worse, a loose affiliation of states) and concentrate on the natural ambition of local leaders to run things locally, especially along sectarian lines until the security situations pans out better. And finally, we continue going after the leaders of the insurgency and terrorist networks, using Iraqis in this process as much as possible to restrict our losses but likewise to increase the competency and confidence of indigenous security forces (plus, quite frankly, the best counter-insurgents are always locals).

Laying out that sort of vision is a whole lot more realistic, especially when you tie it to a drawdown of U.S. ground troops, meaning we leave behind mostly logistical support, special forces and trainers, and our Air Force and Navy to serve as substitute air and sea forces for the local security forces. Then and only then our presence starts to look a lot more like the natural “shoulders” of any intervention.