With friends like these...
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 7:33AM ARTICLE: "Gulf Allies Support Goals Of New U.S. Strategy in Iraq: A carefully worded endorsement, but no commitments to help," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 17 January 2006, p. A9.
ARTICLE: Insurgencies Rarely Win – And Iraq Won’t Be Any Different (Maybe), By Donald Stoker, January 2007
Not a great sign: we're basically down to Saudi Arabia and the GCC and all they're offering are words to the effect that they desperately want Iraq not to break up.
Their commitments to that end? None really. They just really really really don't want that to happen, because if it did, they'd finally be forced into doing something.
We are past the point of "winning" against the insurgency, which--by and large--has been superseded by the dynamics of sectarian violence aimed at the 3-state solution (for lack of a better phrase).
So while the Stokes article is both hopeful and correct, it's also an OBE observation--as in, overtaken by events.
Bush and Co. had their chance with the insurgency. This show is now all about managing Iraq's devolution so that enough unity (or at least the functional facade of unity) can be maintained for eventual economic solution sets to emerge.
As I started writing (now) years ago, the real exit strategy is jobs. Problem for Bush is, once you spiral a society deep into 70 percent unemployment, you've lost all control of the "reconstruction."
Now it's the construction of Iraq 2.0. No matter how that unfolds, no one is going to paint it as a "victory" in any recognizable sense.
So please, do yourself a favor and avoid any "winning/losing" arguments, because they are meaningless.
That's the reality we face, given the choices we've made to date.
Reader Comments (4)
This points to an article Naomi Klein wrote for Harpers. I am curious about Tom's reaction to this article given his exit strategy = jobs formulation, and, if he thinks her observations about what occurred in Iraq are valid, whether he thinks the issues she raised, the difficulty of going from a controlled to a capitalist economy because of the immediate effect on jobs, has any bearing on rule building for sysadmins the next time the core attempts something like this in the gap. One of Ms. Klein's theses is that Bremer tried to shock the Iraqi controlled economy into irrecoverable collapse and then immediately reconstitute it as a pure capitalistic society. It didn' t work, and helped fuel the resistance, because companies would eliminate the featherbed jobs that controlled economies create to keep people employed. Perhaps that needs to occur for the overall good of an econonmy, but the approach, she claims, badly backfired here, among other things. Any useful lessons or slanted misreads of reality?
Nowhere in the world has a nation developed a democratic form of government and the security aparatus to defend it in less than 20 years.
It takes 12 years to develop a competent Brigade staff and the support functions to keep it going (logistics and so forth).
You can't see "winning" because we aren't even halfway through the process. And there are no shortcuts.