In this good piece (The Coming Normalcy?), Kaplan returns to his strength (reporting) and eschews his recent romanticization of Special Ops Forces. Plus, he puts away the reflexive criticism of "Big Army," which, as I tried to argue in last month's Esquire, is working mightily to change its approach to counter-insurgency (the 80/20 split on non-kinetics/kinetics).

Plus, Kaplan moves more and more into the world of economics, which gives his usual excellent reporting a lot more heft. Here's a telling segment pointed out by Michael Lotus:

The stability of Iraq will likely determine history's judgment on President George W. Bush. And yet even in a newly secured area like this one, the administration has provided little money for the one factor essential to that stability: jobs. On a landscape flattened by anarchy in 2004, the American military has constructed a house of cards. Fortifying this fragile structure with wood and cement now will require more aid—in massive amounts, and of a type that even America's increasingly civil affairs–oriented military cannot provide. This house of cards, flimsy as it is, constitutes a substantial achievement. But because Washington's deeds do not match its rhetoric, even this fragile achievement might go for naught.

Here Kaplan comes to a conclusion I was reaching for in BFA: the ultimate exit strategy is jobs (can't remember if I got that exact line in the book, but it's one I use in the brief now). That's what signals serious connectivity because jobs sufficient enough to handle the region's youth bulge will require huge inflows of foreign direct investment--the one key ingredient missing in Iraq. Without the FDI, you leave the region in the queer combination of either Great Depression-like capital starvation or the pathetic buy-out of youthful ambition by the trust fund states like Saudi Arabia. Both ways suck: no one wants money just given to them (despite the myth) and nothing depresses like ambition that cannot find any useful expression (that's what really beat men down in the 1930s).

We've seen this description time and time again of the Iraqi men who waited, and waited, and waited for the jobs and the recovery. And then they finally picked up guns because there was nothing else to do.