Damn the utopians, full speed ahead!

There are many from center to left, who have been banging the drum up on this "military victory means nothing without reconciliation" business for some time now, and the volume on that has been cranked up significantly since the meme about how we were losing the Iraq war militarily, has been discredited, and summarily dumped.

The fact, however, is that full reconciliation is an impossible standard to meet, in any event, regardless of how the military play works out. That's not just rule in Iraq, or Afghanistan, but any war. There are always a large number of holdouts at the end of any war. Always has been. Regardless of where these events occur. Regardless of the cultural influences involved.

Some extreme examples would be the partitioning in response to communist expansionism: Korea, Vietnam, Germany, and so on. Even within the region, the religious and ethnic tensions have been going on literally for thousands of years. Yet, while their frequency has been larger than some other areas of the world, still, wars have been relatively infrequent. Certainly, their differences were not reconciled through that period.

I submit, that the question is not full reconciliation, but rather the question is whether or not the Iraqi government is capable of maintaining the peace. Certainly, that has been the major issue in any other war we have ever fought in. Those are two completely different issues. Maintaining the peace, is not dependent on full reconciliation.

Frankly, I have begun to think that this call for full reconciliation, being the conditioned upon which victory stands, is just another attempt by the left to declare Iraq a failure. Nothing else has worked to so label it, so far.
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Until the Administration commits to actually putting effective, competent people into power in Iraq (rather than whoever is most effectively kissing the right DC backside), there will be no stable Iraq gov't.

Then there will be no stable Iraq government. What you're describing is simply the way our government works whether Democrats or Republicans run the show. Meritocracy is a phantasm.

"Hit it with a bigger hammer" is the only excuse for policy we've ever really used there, and it's the only one that's going to be used until he's out of office.

I honestly don't think that's true, legion. I think that the bigger hammer has been alternated with avoidance, a kind of not-so-benign neglect.

However, that's been a typically American way of doing things for generations—continuing approximation, sort of a Goldilocks approach: too hot, too cold, just right. It's why Churchill said “The Americans will always do the right thing…when every other alternative has been exhausted.”

I wrote a post some time ago on why that probably won't be an effective approach in Iraq. As I suggested above I think we need to revisit means and ends.

Until the Administration commits to actually putting effective, competent people into power in Iraq (rather than whoever is most effectively kissing the right DC backside), there will be no stable Iraq gov't. As long as there is no stable Iraq gov't, there will continue to be a civil war. It's a pretty simple concept, but one Bush has shown he simply cannot wrap his brain around. "Hit it with a bigger hammer" is the only excuse for policy we've ever really used there, and it's the only one that's going to be used until he's out of office.

I really wish that people here would consider the alternatives we really have rather than the alternatives we wish we had and relate them to what they want to achieve. If the sole objective is to reduce American casualties in the short term, for example, withdrawal probably won't achieve that. The last time we withdrew a substantial number of troops under fire (in Viet Nam) we suffered 40% of the casualties of the total conflict.

If the sole objective is to get Iraq off the evening news, the only way to achieve that is immediate withdrawal.

The question is not full reconciliation that question is whether or not the Iraqi government is capable of maintaining the peace. Those are two quite different situations. The latter, is not dependent on the former.