OP-ED: We’re Fighting the Wrong War, By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, Jan 28, 2008

Really solid diagnostic piece by Fareed, reminding me why I wrote what I did over the first half of 2007. We approach the rotational crunch created by Bush's choice to eschew the diplomatic surge in conjunction with the troop surge and Petraeus' COIN strategy. We're there on the Balkans-done-backward, as Biddle astutely observes, which, as I've long argued, forces a dial-down of the U.S presence into a Vietnam-done-backwards (direct action to advising) unless you somehow surmount the rotational limits that currently threaten to break our ground forces. Even if you blow off the troop issue, you've got Fallon demanding and getting more Marines for Afghanistan and some kinetic/nonkinetic response brewing on the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas (of Pakistan)]. All of this means the lack of a diplomatic surge keeps us tied down in Iraq with a very fragile non-war that somebody's got to babysit for years--Biden's soft partition continues with the continuing danger of a Lebanon-style civil war erupting for years into the future. And all that means is that Bush has effectively passed off Iraq-the-postwar to the next administration with nothing in the way of a lasting settlement, either internal (Iraq is still broken outside of the Kurdish region) or regional (Iran and Saudi Arabia still pose more competition questions than cooperation answers) or even extra-regional (with all due respect to Fareed, South Africa and Poland wouldn't exactly constitute my idea of a Core quorum). Thus the next admin is confronted by the untenability of this situation: either break the Army or risk the return of civil war or pretend the UN can take over for us. Any Democratic administration that picks from this undesirable lot will be lambasted by the Right, which may be Rove and Cheney's hand-tying strategy all along. But the reality is that the SysAdmin New Core function arrives in bits and pieces--witness the reconstruction contracts that the Chinese and Russians pick up along the way, along with the Iranians. Thus we effectively cut on the reconstruction and stay on the peacekeeping. Not the worst world, if we were a bit more self aware on thus subject and stopped babbling about "winning" or "losing" this "war," but there you have it. Bush effectively abdicated the intervention to Petraeus last September, and the general has done a great job of taking what the situation gave him (the Anbar awakening) and turning it into a lasting advantage on tamping down sectarian strife (the ethnic cleansing, largely completed, does not reach the level of violence many observers predicted), meaning he effectively turned the occupational clock back to the initial postwar dynamics, except this time we're not disbanding the extant forces but co-opting them. But again, that still leaves the reconstruction, outside of the Kurdish region, largely stillborn--almost five years in. And again, that's not sustainable. We've quieted the civil war by agreeing to let the Shiia and Sunni run their own security regimes (as we did all along with the Kurdish peshmerga), but that stability can dissolve and will inevitably dissolve under the long term pressure of a continuing great depression among those two populations. So in the end, as one of my recent columns argues, Bush has reset the clock without locating a way ahead. Instead, we're left with the same basic packages in place on Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and a contiuing Al Qaeda center of gravity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That has been a ton of blood and treasure spent to achieve this strategic stalemate. (Thanks: jarrod myrick)