Regular reader and commenter Menno sens in this excellent and extensive analysis of FRONTLINE: the insurgency.

I don't know if you've already heard about this, but PBS FRONTLINE recently aired a program on the Iraq insurgency. I haven't had the chance to see the program yet myself, however their website has several transcripts of interviews with a variety of individuals (Col. McMaster, an Arab journalist, a TIME Magazine bureau chief, etc). Outside of Col. McMaster's interview, of which variations have been reported elsewhere, TIME Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware went into detail about certain aspects of the insurgency that indirectly mesh with your recommendation to co-opt Iran:

"[There is] an Iranian-backed, Iranian-directed, Iranian-funded and, at the very least, Iranian-inflamed insurgency in the south of Iraq and in parts of Baghdad...So essentially, just as the Americans did in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- an alliance of native opposition groups were backed, funded and then led by special forces -- that's precisely what Iran did to America here in Iraq. So they seized real and effective control of the south. ...as British military intelligence describes to me, as secret U.S. intelligence documents clearly show, as members of these militias have told me, and as the Iranians' own documents betray -- what they're doing is, it's like an occupation by stealth. In all the things that the American occupation is trying to do on all the levels -- military, political, diplomatic, economic, humanitarian -- the Iranians are mirroring this. They've got military forces here performing certain functions. They're pumping in money using front companies. They're trying to take advantage of and dominate the economy of the south. They're particularly interested in the oil and other forms of commerce. They're just pumping people and money and literature into their madrassas, the mosques, the universities. What has happened to Basra University is mind-boggling -- all this kind of thing. So in every way, on all the levels of a civil military operation, the Iranians are nearing, and with enormous sums of money. These opposition groups that were formed to oppose Saddam, and some of which have been formed after the arrival of the Americans, are ... answering to and being funded by the Revolutionary Guard just across the border. The main aim of the military aspect of this Iranian-backed campaign is to bog down the coalition forces without actually provoking them. So the idea is to just chip away, say, at the British presence in the south, just unsettle them so much that they never feel stable, so, as a very senior British commander in the south told me, "so that we must remain in force-protection mode.

...Iran has played on some levels what one could describe as a very smart game in Iraq. They've backed every horse in the race, waiting to see which ones will come good. Since 2003, I've had Iraqi Sunni Baathist commanders telling me about the Iranian money they get. It's not funding their operations. It certainly wasn't then. In fact, these Baathist commanders, the biggest complaint to me about these damned Iranians was that they're too smart by half: "Instead of just giving us the money in one big lump sum, they feed it to us in little bits so we've always got to go back to them asking for more." That way they can maintain the contact and keep getting the intelligence."

Obviously grand strategy is beyond the realm of this journalist, but it seems evident that the quickest (and least bloody) method to bottle up the more militant militias of Sadr and the like -- not to mention taking some wind out of the sails of the Sunni insurgency -- is your recommendation to co-opt Iran. At the very least it'll take a great deal of heat off of our British allies.

In one of the interviews with an Army officer, he obliquely makes the case for a SysAdmin force:

"I go out there, … and I'm talking to everybody, and I'm saying, "Well, we're bringing you hope," and they're looking at me like, "Yeah, so?" … What these people want is a job. They want food. They've got all these kids. They want a sense of security. It's all about [Abraham] Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You've got to satisfy this down here if you want them to self-actualize.

So as I approached the fight, I wanted to be able to face the challenges that were inherent in the fact that there wasn't an economic alternative. I'm a soldier; I can't build jobs. So I'm wrestling with that. I'm wrestling with the fear factor. I'm wrestling with all these components, and I'm trying to figure out how to get at the enemy, because to me it wasn't good enough that if I put a couple of tanks and Brads [Bradley fighting vehicles] out there and deter the enemy from attacking, that ain't winning. So how do I win?

The way that I've told you that I think we're winning is this: I'm not still providing an economic alternative really that much, although we do hire some folks to clean canals and do that, but that's not an overall economic alternative. I can't do that; the Iraqi government has to do that. But no one is going to come in here and provide jobs or invest in Iraq until they believe that the environment is stable and secure enough so that they can invest in that.

This is what I try and reinforce to the Iraqis that I talk to all the time, is you've got to take risks to break the cycle, because it's a cycle that will continue. [If] there's not a stable and secure environment, nobody will invest in Iraq. You can't hire folks, so they don't have a job; they don't have a job, so they join the insurgency. Then we kill some of the insurgents or we detain them, and then we grab large numbers of folks, and we add to the insurgency, and the cycle continues."

Going back to Michael Ware's interview, there was a point he made that I wanted to ask you about:

"By these guys' own admission, they do not have any inherent or fundamental grievance with the United States. These were soldiers and security officers and intelligence officers who served Saddam or Saddam's regime. There's many of them, including the guys in this grainy night-vision footage, [who] have made clear to me, "Saddam was my commander in chief, but I served Iraq." They're professionals, some of whom were trained by the Americans in the '80s, some of whom had Ranger training in the '70s. So these guys had no inherent beef with the United States; it was the occupation.

Even after the toppling of Saddam, many of the insurgents I know and some of the men in [my] early film would tell me, "Look, we've got no real problem with you removing Saddam." Some of them are actually grateful [because] they came from tribes that had always been part of the regime. At the slightest hint or moment of paranoid delusion, Saddam would institute a purge against all the officers from their tribe. Some of them had even been jailed by Saddam. ... So in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, most of these guys in the insurgency as a whole ... gave the Americans a chance; they gave them a window. They stood back and watched them [come in]; they went home like they all were told to do. They served either for the Americans, or they left their intelligence headquarters and they went home and they sat and they waited.

And then they started to see what happened, and that's when they started picking up their [guns], and then they started picking up RPKs [Ruchnoi Puleymot Kalashnikova, light machine guns] and then they started picking up RPGs, and then they started picking up surface-to-surface missiles, and then they started making IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. Then they started launching complex ambushes. Then they started coordinating with Zarqawi's nascent Al Qaeda organization. There was a moment in time when all of this could have been avoided in so many ways."

The "limited window" theme (generally a couple of months, though obviously it varies depending on the situation) is one that has been constantly mentioned whenever the US intervenes militarily, whether its Desert Storm or OIF, Afghanistan, the Balkans (I remember reading about plenty of those "missed opportunities" a few years before I was deployed there), Haiti, and even Katrina. Depending upon the dynamics, the results of missing that window varies.

What I wanted to ask is whether or not you've ever considered "wargaming" the SysAdmin force as a follow-up to the "New Map Game" awhile back, in the sense of how quickly and efficiently you can get a country back on its feet economically once this force enters, whereby most civilians see immediate humanitarian and economic benefits. I don't mean that to be used as a bragging argument [I CAN GET YOUR COUNTRY BACK ON ITS FEET AND THEN SOME IN 45 DAYS!], but as a method of determining if such a "limited window" can possibly be met. I ask because NATO's ground intervention in the Balkans got the security element right (for the most part), but was quite slow on the economic front -- despite the presence of plenty of UN/NATO economic experts and other such officials -- and as a result lead to local disillusionment and later political problems; in other words, we missed the window. I'm sure organizing such a wargame would be difficult (let alone finding the right scenario), but in my opinion I think it would add greater support and understanding for the SysAdmin force if you somehow tackled the initial kickstart economic element of the force (before the FDI flows in), as you did already with the force's military and international institution aspects. I know you state that you don't consider it wise to give specifics outside of your area of expertise, which is more than understandable, but maybe a wargame-like event would allow you to bring in such experts.

Keep up the great work and I hope you end up feeling better soon.

Tom's answer to Menno's question:

This is the natural extension to the New Map Game and it's an exercise I want to pursue. Once Enterra Solutions has a deeper relationship with Oak Ridge National Lab (something we're working hard to achieve), I'm hoping we can pursue that sort of thing there with our concept of Development-in-a-Box.

So, great idea. Agree completely. Welcome any further thinking on the subject.

Tom adds later:

Later, after I landed in Newark and read Menno's full email (restricted on my Treo), I realized that I had already explored this question twice: In the Y2K project (see the Scenario Dynamics Grid) and in the Systems Perturbation workshop I ran for Art Cebrowski and his office in the post-9/11 period of the NewRuleSets.Project.

Point? Not only do we have a host of recent experiences to miine, there is plenty of previous thinking to mine. Both realizations make me even more eager to someday be part of such an effort: mapping post-whatever scenario dynamics.

Come to think of it: Barnett Consulting (meaning Bradd Hayes and I) did such an after-action on the Station Nightclub Fire disaster for the United Way of Rhode Island. All these efforts modeled the same "golden hour" phenomenon.

Thanks again, Menno, for pushing my thinking and reminding me to consider past efforts (to include Enterra colleague Bradd Hayes own book "Doing Windows" on postwar ops).

Thank you, Menno, for your good work and for sending in this review.