THE RACE FOR CONTROL
Iraq has always been a race for control on the ground. Evidence of the U.S. not thinking in those terms, let alone actively keeping one-step ahead on the curve in this race, goes back to 2003 (I'm thinking now of the grab of the religious Awqaf, the endowment funds, in the South that was widely reported ...).
"Forced withdrawal" has long seemed a remote possibility, it would seem, given the capabilities of the troops on the ground. However, it has been a looming consideration here, especially juxtaposed with those commentators who seem to think that a contained, limited-scale civil war are the worst outcomes for the U.S., in some ways.
A NEW ASSESSMENT - ESTIMATING THE INESTIMABLE
Now comes this assessment, that maybe, after a long, long string of "stay the course", the situation may actually be on the brink of really coming down to ... leave or escalate. In other words, "go long", once thought to be a viable strategy, is losing it's ... event horizon.
Alarmist or not? Hard to say with any certainty - even in reverse key turning points are hard to identify in similarly typed conficts, but I could never take it off the table, the way some folks seem to have done ...
Simon Tisdall - The Guardian
Wednesday February 28, 2007
An elite team of officers advising US commander General David Petraeus in Baghdad has concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.
Part of the trouble with "stability operations" is that you don't get a lot of re-tries. There is a cumulative aspect to the impact of them. What's more, terrorism has powerful tools, force multipliers. And here is the rub: some violence can unleash geometrically expanding forces, while economic stability steps are weakly self-reinforcing, and often slow, linear or episodic in implementation.
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