The second thing I note is that the articles describe a shift emphasis away from empowering the central government and towards empowering existing local power structures. They describe negotiated peace and even alliances with local armed groups that may or may not support the central Iraqi government. They describe infrastructure projects (using primarily local labour, I note :-P). Pay off the young men who would otherwise form the militias (or - even better - give them honest work to do for an honest wage). [1]
In other words, it looks like the US strategy is moving towards what has been suggested here on ET already. I have to admit that this surprises me. It appears that even the Bushies' strategy for Iraq is saner than I have been giving them credit for so far.
Further, this movement is correlated with the apparent success (at least as measured by the metrics we have examined so far). So - keeping in mind that correlation is not quite the same thing as causation - I would be tempted to claim some level of vindication for The Plan(TM).
- Jake
[1] As an aside, I cannot help but note that this kind of program would never get approval if it were proposed to mitigate crime in the slums of a US city. Why, using state-created jobs for the explicit purpose of reducing unemployment and unemployment-related crime, that's positively Socialist! Or at least French :-P If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
That should be "a shift in emphasis" obviously.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
it looks like the US strategy is moving towards what has been suggested here on ET already.
The temptation to snark the hell out of this remark is very hard to resist.
But I will.
Instead, I will just say that I would very be interested in seeing links showing that The Plan(TM), or something like it, was seriously considered on ET 18 or more months ago i.e before or during the time when we were formulating the Surge strategy.
Absent that, wouldn't be more accurate to say that JakeS has just unintentionally appropriated, and implicitly validated, major elements of the current US strategy in Iraq?
Seriously, you ET'ers need to realize that whatever sources of information you rely on for Iraq have not served you well in this case.
Maybe you should broaden your reading list? I'm not talking about Commentary, Weekly Review, and the WSJ editorial page, which are of course partisan sources. Thank you for being willing to read them at least.
Start with Michael Yon:
...whose work is endorsed by none other than Joe Galloway...yes, The Joe Galloway.
Also check out:
You may have heard of some of these, but based on your general take on Iraq you need to pay more attention to them. They are invaluable, first hand sources. They tell the good, the bad, and the ugly. Only a close-minded partisan would dismiss them as partisan. __ I am the most conservative Unitarian-Universalist you will ever meet.
Instead, I will just say that I would very be interested in seeing links showing that The Plan(TM), or something like it, was seriously considered on ET 18 or more months ago i.e before or during the time when we were formulating the Surge strategy. Absent that, wouldn't be more accurate to say that JakeS has just unintentionally appropriated, and implicitly validated, major elements of the current US strategy in Iraq?
It validates the reconstruction part of the US strategy. I won't attempt to asses the military part of it, because my information regarding that part is insufficient and so is my expertise in the area. But the emphasis still given to the military component in the official propaganda (see your links, for instance) gives me the impression that the Surge is 1/3 sanity and 2/3 staying the course.
I expressed surprise at the presence of any sanity at all, because frankly I didn't expect that. But that doesn't make it impressive.
Since I didn't sneak peek at the Pentagon's Iraq strategy while formulating mine - and since I haven't kept abreast of the developments in Iraq beyond noting the development in the American casualty figures occasionally, I think it's fair to say that this is a case of parallel evolution. We can argue about who discovered the strategy first, but I am happy to concede the honours, because I haven't seen it spelled out before.
But the major premises - that the central government isn't viable, that there needs to be more building and negotiation and considerably less reliance on purely military solutions have been around since forever, or at least since before I started frequenting the site (which was before the Surge started).
I am not sure I see how they failed us. The task was to come up with a viable strategy for Iraq. We did.
You raised a number of objections in another thread, and I made a number of replies, but I haven't seen anything so far that would kill my plan dead if sufficient political will to implement it existed.
Another task was to determine whether it would be wise for Europe to support the current US stance in Iraq. So far my impression is that it is not.
This is based partially on the fact that the US strategic stance still appears to be sufficiently far removed from what I think would be most effective that it might very well be more effective to use European resources to set up a separate effort. And partly on the fact that the apparent long-term objectives of the US in Iraq (basing rights, containment of Iran, installation of one or more pliable client states, securing the Iraqi oil for US-based corporations, padding the pocketbooks of various and sundry war profiteers, etc.) are not particularly savoury.
Finally, none of the current American stance addresses the part of the problem that resides at least partially outside Iraq, namely documenting and dealing with the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed fairly massively by all sides in the conflict. So far, the US and their European fellow-travellers appear to be in complete denial that there might be a problem here, which is not exactly the most constructive attitude, to put it mildly...
So while our information was incomplete, it wasn't sufficiently incomplete to substantially change the strategic picture; at least not from where I sit.
So I went trawling for diaries and stories on Iraq deom 18+ months ago, and I found this:
As an aside, I cannot help but note that this kind of program would never get approval if it were proposed to mitigate crime in the slums of a US city.
Surely you must be kidding me? In the US we do this stuff all the time.
Well, not the Surge, but community-building. The difference is, it is done primarily on the local level, recently quite successfully in cities like New York which were supposed to be the intractable, textbook examples of the failure of capitalism.
Unlike the socialists, we haven't lost site of the fact that government doesn't create jobs, it just re-allocates them, usually badly and with "unexpected" side-effects. That is why we try to keep the efforts local, and try to keep in mind that the only long-term solution involves jobs that are real, i.e. self-sustaining without subsidy. Unfortunately, we too often forget, (arrg! Ethanol! How I hate thee!) and disaster ensues.
One of the enduring misunderstandings that Europeans have about the USA is, they assume that if the national government isn't doing something, then nothing real or substantial is being done. And in most European countries, that would be a fair assumption.
Worse, the European press, reflecting and reinforcing the group-think of the European governing elites, goes to ridiculous extremes to perpetuate this stereotype.
But in the US it is the opposite: All the real work goes on in the private sector, both for-profit and non-profit, and at the state and local level. Our federal anti-poverty, etc. programs are some of the least effective American institutions that exist.
Indeed, part of the reason the so-called "Surge" strategy has been so popular with the troops is, community building comes naturally to them.
They are citizen-soldiers.
Will it work? I dunno. But Iraqis are certainly beginning to take notice. Europe should too. __ I am the most conservative Unitarian-Universalist you will ever meet.
One of the enduring misunderstandings that Europeans have about the USA is, they assume that if the national government isn't doing something, then nothing real or substantial is being done.
It's not a misunderstanding, because it mostly isn't.
It's nice that the US is a veritable capitalist utopia of convivial communality, but if all anyone can see is the shanty-town poor when you visit the rougher areas, it's hard to be convinced that there's a plan at all, never mind that the plan is working.
If you don't have a government ethic of communality - which the US doesn't, particularly - then it's no surprise that federal programs don't currently work.
That doesn't mean they can't in principle, it means you no longer have the culture to do them properly, which isn't quite the same thing.
So if you're going to tell me that the glories of free enterprise have stepped in to fill the gap across the US, I'm going to have to ask what evidence there is that this has made any real difference.
If the private sector is so all-powerful, it should surely have solved the problem by now. It's not as if there's been a lot of hostility to private efforts from Washington for the last decade or so.
And yet - the trend has been for lower wages, longer hours, poorer infrastructure, and more unemployment. What's wrong with this picture?
As for job creation - are you saying the New Deal didn't actually work at all? The freeways, the dams, the infrastructure were just pointless make-work?
Unlike the socialists, we haven't lost site of the fact that government doesn't create jobs, it just re-allocates them,
This is simply false. If you have involuntary unemployment, the state can indeed create jobs out of thin air.
They may not be meaningful (then again, they may be - railroad construction and operation, for instance, is something The Market(TM) does badly if at all). But even if they aren't meaningful - even if it is just a matter of digging holes in the ground - it will still stimulate demand for other, worthwhile production.
If the government finances this through direct taxation of wealth (and/or the high incomes that usually correlate with wealth), or runs a temporary deficit, the net result is a transfer of demand to the present - where it can pull an economy out of a recession - from the future - where it, if the economy has been managed properly - will be recouped during a boom. Or from such excess demand harvested during a past boom.
All the real work goes on in the private sector, both for-profit and non-profit, and at the state and local level. [My emphasis]
If you need charity, then the government isn't doing its job.
Snark aside, you're not even right about the government not doing constructive work. Right off the bat, I can think of only two parts of US infrastructure that works as well as or better than the German equivalent: The National Park Service and the Interstate Highways. Both are Federal operations.
