ONE'S FOREIGN POLICY EXPERTISE...:

Victory In Iraq: How we got here is a matter for history. But the democratic ideal is still within reach. (Fareed Zakaria, 6/06/09, NEWSWEEK)

[A]s levels of violence declined, so did interest in the war. Once it became clear that Iraq was reasonably—just reasonably—stable and that U.S. casualties were low, Americans promptly lost interest in the war and the country. You would have to search long and far to find much coverage of Iraq now outside of a few elite publications. [...]

When the surge was announced in January 2007, I was somewhat cautious about it. I believed that more troops and a proper counterinsurgency strategy would certainly improve the security situation—I had advocated more troops from the start of the occupation—but I believed that the fundamental problem in Iraq was political discord among the country's three main sects and ethnic groups. The surge, in my view, would alleviate those tensions but also postpone the need for a solution. Only a political agreement among these groups could reach one.

I was wrong in some ways. First, the surge turned out to be a more sophisticated strategy—encompassing political outreach to the Sunnis—than I had imagined. Second, the success of the surge empowered the Baghdad government, brought Sunni rebels out from hiding and thus broke the dynamic of the civil war. Sunni militants have now been identified, their biometric data have been collected and their groups are being monitored. They cannot easily go back to jihad. The Shiite ruling elites, secure in their hold on the country, have less to gain by ethnic cleansing and militia rule. An adviser to surge commander Gen. David Petraeus told the reporter Nir Rosen that the civil war in Iraq would end when the Sunnis knew that they'd lost and the Shiites knew that they'd won. Both now seem to be true.

...is directly proportional to one's failure to comprehend that the war was about empowering the Shi'ite majority.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2009 7:55 AM