Short Blog Vacation

Because of other commitments, the reader should not expect additional posts to this blog for the next two weeks.

American Strategy in Iraq

Juan Cole reprints in his blog the opinion of Professor Kahl of Minnesota on the apparent counterinsurgency strategies of the United States since the beginning of the Iraq war. Let me summarize briefly Professor Kahl’s points. He divides the COIN operations into four phases.
Phase 1: Denial. Until April 2004, there was a general denial [...]

Iraqi Opinions

Juan Cole leads us to consider some recent polls. A recent survey by the British Opinion Research Business (ORB) showed that Iraqis had remarkable confidence in spite of all that has happened. Support for Prime Minister Maliki was much more widespread than had been expected. In their polls, increase in support compared with September was [...]

Afghanistan: Less is More

Rory Stewart, who works out of Kabul, is presently a guest Op-Ed writer for the New York Times. He has been making a concerted effort to tell us, and the West, to “back off”in Afghanistan. This is very counter-intuitive for me. I was one of those who counseled when we went to Afghanistan after 9/11 [...]

Iran in Iraq

In the last few days the Times has given us a summary of the recent economic penetration by Iran into Iraq. We could view this negatively, as many in Washington are wont to do. But from the viewpoint of all but the hardest line Sunnis, it should be considered as a real harbinger of hope [...]

Thoughts on Resolving the Democrat’s Dilemma

Unfortunately, the only good strategy most democrats have for getting out of Iraq is a rewriting of the argument that we shouldn’t have gotten in, and when we got in, we should have done x, y, and z. This is all true, but as David Brooks point out in today’s Op-Ed, it doesn’t add up [...]

Afghan Democracy

In a recent Op-Ed, Rory Stewart who runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and has been much involved In Afghan and Iraq affairs lashes out at what he sees as the foolishness and pretension involved in our project to make Afghnaistan into a fully functioning democracy in the next few years. He claims that [...]