Well, no point in beating that Very dead horse…

But re-reading the above, one has to wonder? One does indeed have to use the Humpty Dumpty metaphor. Putting this dumpty back together again is not something a foreign occupier is going to do - And if there was even a chance that it could be done, it would take a heck of a lot more troops than we have now.

It is indeed time to recognise that fulfilling our responsibility does not mean staying there to make things worse. Our very presense obfuscates the probelms, dare I say, magnifies the problems?

And forget Al Qaeda. They never were a threat to occupy Iraq, and by the very nature of things, could Never be a threat to occupy Iraq. It’s not just a red herring, it’s the whole herring fleet… :)

Offer them billions of aid money, our expertise (minus Haliberton) and leave. It will be far cheaper and even more humane to pull out while we can do so with a fig leaf of dignity.

Dave

Why not just withdraw. 911 was essentially an immigration screwup. Our Islamic friends constute what Greg Cochran calls the “Mideast powder thimble.” Without us, they will likely kill each other. If they build peaceful states, that would be lovely, but not our problem. Even the Pak nukes are more India’s problem than ours.

Secure the borders, bring the troops home.

theneutralist.blogspot.com

A sort of super controller with the role to guarantee each stakeholder that no side will be able to overcome the others. The Syrians too changed alliances each a partner became too strong or difficult to control. Then came the cedars revolution with western support…

This role should be administrated through intelligent use of soft and hard power and an open channel with Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. This role under the banner to fight Al-Qaeda, a simple narrative, and a never ending story, that is acceptable from each side.

In my opinion this is the only possible outcome. If this outcome is worth its cost I’m not able to judge. Maybe, if the US and the West could use this time to conceive a grand strategy and a technological “surge” (see Fabius’s blog about this) to exit from oil dependence, this temporary solution could have some reason.

Like Humpty Dumpty, which was really was the name of a big cannon that fell from it’s tower, this state without natural/historic borders is not going to be put together again the way it was. Both the European and the Persian sides of the Ottoman Empire are Balkanized with state bits which act like tribes.

These ethnic groups have many more parts than the three noted by rogelio007 above. This conflict may have, at least, four phases; the first two phases have been completed: 1. Ethnic groups joint to form political parties and militias, 2. Militias clear mixed neighborhoods, 3. Militias join with other militias to control larger warlord areas. 4. Nearby States will fund their ethnic warlords. 5. The US and Russia, with possibly China and India, will become even more entangled supporting their States – this is the phase that must be stopped.

Because of the way we are fighting them over there, which is training and motivating them, this conflict will produce blowbacks in the West proportional to its duration and the destruction of societies over there – if the young are only educated in war, then that is what each generation so training will do.

It’s a “mission accomplished” if the Balkanized are too small to develop weapons of mass destruction. Bismarck responded to a question of what would he do if the British army were to invade Prussia by saying that he “would call the police and have them arrested”. Our oceanic channels provide some tactical defenses, if only we could become more strategically wiser regarding the size and nature of the threat. They are not defeating us; it’s our response which is harming us military, politically and economically — Sun Tzu noted the harm of any prolonged war.

Indeed, given globalization and related phenomena, how can the state continue to function - military aspirations to the contrary notwithstanding.

As somebody writing to the editor of the NYT pointed out, any spending resulting from the current proposed stimulus would be as apt to benefit foreign companies as it would be to benefit domestic firms. And much depends upon whether the European central bank should follow the Fed in lowering rates.

I am not here to debate the merits of this economic policy or that. Rather, I am here to point out that the traditional tools of both fiscal and monetary economic policy seem increasingly feeble.

And this is for our massive, continent-wide economy. So the economic tools of lesser states would be feebler still.

Absent economic power, any state would become a fiction. And so would such military power as had been associated with it.

Can we take responsibility for this? Or was our contribution secondary to that of local elites who established working community functions after the collapse of the central Iraq government?

Then the peaceably functioning local communities would have no protection
against outside predators, i.e. the neighbors, after President Clinton
or President Obama removes the bulk of United States armed forces by the
summer of 2010.