POST: Religion and Insurgency

Good piece that I agree with in terms of the hyperbole we're often subjected to regarding "religious insurgencies." I agree with Kilcullen: there's nothing special about this time around. The same-old, same-old can be addressed with solid counter-insurgency techniques, updated for the technology. In that sense, I find that little changes in war, more so in the requirements for peace and stabilty. Where I part with Kilcullen is the notion that squelching the insurgency makes Iraq stable enough that we should still view defeating Al Qaeda there as job #1. My perception, based on no field observations, is that the insurgency has been overtaken by sectarian violence, so that focusing on AQI is like treating the fever instead of the infection. So I'm still stuck with a judgment of "just enough, but too late" on the surge because we won't work the sectarian struggle via regional diplomacy to any serious degree, because Bush decided to add Iran's containment on top of this difficult occupation. Thus my argument that we force our military to fight this postwar under the worst possible strategic circumstances in a post-Cold War world (meaning, as I point out in my column this weekend, we face no superpower rival on the far side, thus our "loss of face" potential here is vastly overstated).