Politics, Iraq

[tagryn]

• Good article in Small Wars Journal which gives some context to the recent successes in Iraq which Michael Yon has been reporting on. Summary: while combining with local insurgents has permitted victories against Al Qaeda in Iraq, it doesn't solve the long-term problem of the Ba'athist professional military remnants who constitute most of the insurgency. While being able to reach consensus with the Ba'athists that AQI is a common enemy is progress in a divide-and-conquer way, it still leaves the huge problem of power-sharing between the various factions, something that the Iraqi government does not seem able to solve.
  
  
• Stephen Bainbridge: Iraq as Kobyashi Maru
  
  
• Problem with the "we should have finished the job in Afghanistan" meme: once OBL escaped Tora Bora, this line of reasoning tends to lead inevitably to advocating invading northern Pakistan...the problems therein - geography, nukes, India, etc. - which make what's happened in Iraq look like easy by comparison.
  
  I also think Afghanistan is a basket case, and has been for most of its existance. Making it into a prosperous, peaceful country was probably at least as beyond our capacity as doing that in Iraq has turned out to be.
  
  
• I agree with this piece from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:
  

  Americans hire presidents and fire them. They're not as sweet about it as they used to be. This is not because they have grown cynical, but because they are disappointed, by both teams and both sides. Some part of them thinks no matter who is president he will not protect them from forces at work in the world. Some part of them fears that when history looks back on this moment, on the past few presidents and the next few, it will say: Those men were not big enough for the era.

  
  
• Wrapup on the major GOP candidates: why Giuliani, Romney, and McCain are all seriously flawed. OK, the Giuliani video is a union hit-piece akin to Swift Boat in '04, but there's other problems with his candidacy as well. Fred Thompson's running as bland a campaign as possible. On the other side of the aisle, Hillary looks like she's going to win by default, which would give us over 2 straight decades of Clintons-and-Bushes running things. Edwards is a personal injury trial lawyer by profession, which means he was contributing to the process which helped mess up the health care system...and he's the guy we're supposed to believe will reform the system, after building his personal wealth on it? Not likely. Obama is the most eloquent of them all, and while I love his reach-across-the-aisle rhetoric, his actual voting history is too far left for me, plus the whole lack of experience thing.