Thinking Through Iraq

I suppose I´ve been waiting for people to think seriously through what´s going on in Iraq, and what should be done about it (I prefer that to 'muddling through'). I would have done more myself but I have neither the experiences or the training to make that natural, so it´s great to find others doing it.

Ever since it became apparent the Sunni resistance wasn´t fading away it it seemed likely that someone, somewhere, had a real strategy, and that person or those persons, or that culture, wasn´t on our side.

Healing Iraq has a great post on the strategy of the terrorist-Sunni-Baathist alliance.

Arthur Chrenkoff, meanwhile, fills in another part of the equation- the reluctance of the Iraqi populace to make the effort to cooperate sufficiently with the reconstruction process to end the foolish and dangerous resistance.

I particularly like what he has to say about the effects of totalitarianism on the people subjugated:

'Nothing, however, in our generally safe and comfortable existence would helps us understand just how pervasively difficult, destructive and dispiriting the experience of life under a totalitarian regime is. For most of us, life in Saddam's Iraq would have been no more real than the Middle Earth of the colonial New England'