[magician]

Certainly.

"...Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror's "central front."

I do not think that we are constrained to just these two choices.

I do not believe that the counterinsurgency in Iraq will be indefinite, and I certainly do not believe that reducing American involvement in Iraq, even if we leave behind a broken country "beset by chaos and civil strife," as the author phrases it, will be tantamount to handing Al Qaeda a major victory.

I have long been an advocate of a Salvador strategy writ large, and I think that we are lurching towards that model incrementally.

The Reader's Digest version of that strategy includes:

1. Small US forces, focused primarily on advisory efforts, modernization, training, and parallel command, control, intelligence, and logistics networks.

2. Political measures, such as the current roadmap, including a new constitution, elections, and Iraqi forms of representative democracy. A viable judiciary which does not release captured terrorists is vital.

3. Economic measures, to include nurturing current free market flourishing in Iraq, despite the vulnerable road and rail networks in the country. Inherent in this concept is a national energy policy for the country which ensures that Iraqis perceive that Americans are not "stealing their oil." We also need to do what is feasible to ensure that endemic corruption does not generate a new mafia class.

The author touches on the likelihood that Iraq will fission into a Shia south, a Kurdish north, with a Sunni middle. This is not necessarily a grave danger to US goals in the region, nor to US policies. We have good allies in the Kurds, and I hope that we can keep them, despite our abuse of their nationalism in the past. This will obviously cause friction with Turkey, a NATO ally, and will heighten our differences with Syria, which I believe to be inevitable, anyway.

I agree that it is likely that the Shia south will increasingly fuse to Iran, but Iran itself is neither monolithic nor invulnerable. I believe that regime change in Iran is also inevitable, given time. The demographics alone are on our side. The problem is, it is impossible to assign a timetable to regime change in Iran, and this complicates our ability to plan and to carefully influence it in our favor.

I believe that a dissident and rebellious Sunni center will be caught between the Kurds and the Shia, and it very well may end up resembling the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. It is, perhaps, more possible to contain a Sunni heartland than an entire country, and if nothing else, it can continue to serve as a magnet for Jihadis, who should be encouraged to go there to be killed.

Such a Sunni center can serve as a safety valve for both Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until political change can take place in those countries, and as a causus belli for transitioning American focus onto Syria. Yes, this is a diabolical concept. I shudder to write it. The alternative, of course, is for the Sunni to accept that their time in power has passed, and to make acommodations to the new modalities of power in a federal Iraq. The choice is theirs. America can assist Kurds and Shia in containing and kililng Jihadis far more readily than America can continue to fight as we fight now.

I doubt that the Sunni in Iraq will make such pragmatic decisions. It is more likely that they will cleave to their dreams of a resurgent Caliphate, and doom themselves to generations of poverty and bitterness.

The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic.

I disagree with this statement.

Rather than "withdrawal," I would say "draw down."

I have long bemoaned the conventional mindset of Big Army, and the approach to warfare still held dear by our generals. Afghanistan illustrated a new way of waging war, and it is one that needs to be fostered. Unfortunately, sending in small, specialized units backed by money, logistics and air power is not as expensive as waging conventional warfare, which has favorable economic consequences here in the US. Yes, I am cynical, and I am more prone to what others dismiss as conspiracy theories than I would like.

But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops.

This is only true if we persist in fighting as we have been fighting. If we transition to a different model, we could conceivably sustain advisory efforts in Iraq much longer. Such a model would be heavily dependent on our ability to train and prepare enough specialists to handle the job. That means thousands of Arabic speakers graduating from DLI, yes, but what it also means is exploiting the historic quality of our current forces, who have never been better trained, nor more experienced. What a resource to be tapped!

Unfortunately, it is not possible to mass produce such specialists, given our current hidebound and hoary conventional military leadership. It is too significant a shift, I fear. Some acculteration is inevitable. Where the sweet spot resides...is the real question, from a doctrinal and practical standpoint.

For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft.

I believe that the author displays his ignorance with this statement, as any professional soldier knows that an all volunteer force, such as we have now, is vastly preferable to one incorporating involuntary draftees.

It is the quality of US forces more than our technology, even, which makes our military such a formidable force. And our technology requires specialized forces, who are retained wilingly.

We cannot revert to a "meat grinder" approach. That would be doomed to failure. We do not require infinite numbers of sacrificial infantrymen. We require smart, professional, excessively trained and competent specialists in counterinsurgency. If such men start out as conventional soldiers, so much the better. It is an excellent foundation. Those who cannot make the transition can remain in the conventional forces. Those who can adapt are those that we need to refine and retain.

...the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

I do agree with this statement. It is one of the primary reasons why we need to shift to a more deft way of waging war. There is another historical example, which itself influenced the evolution of counterinsurgency in El Salvador: the Phoenix Program.

We need a Phoenix Program for a new era, one which respects no national boundaries, and which never relents. We need to focus on those who post Al Qaeda screeds and terrorist cookbooks on the internet, we need to focus on their financing, we need to focus on killing their bombmakers and technicians, and we also need to focus on their madrasas, and their clerics.

Even more, however, we need an information strategy for the age of the internet.

Nothing makes terror more feasible than mass media. Without the media, terrorism is tactical -- weapons of mass destruction aside.

But the issue of WMDs....is a whole other conversation.

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