Ezra, Eric Martin, and Rodger Payne provide good commentary on Ned Parker's LA Times article about the fragmentation of Iraq. As we've discussed before, the tribal alliances strategy (if not the Surge itself) has left Iraq without a central government capable of keeping order or executing policy. "Low level reconciliation" is all fine and well, but it fundamentally misses the point; such reconciliation might persuade armed groups to refrain from fighting each other for the time being, but does nothing to increase state capacity. As an oil-producing state Iraq needs less of what we traditionally call state capacity (the ability to tax in particular) than other states, but "less" is different than "none". A related problem is that these groups have, as of now, little to gain by reconciling themselves with and placing themselves under the control of the Iraqi state. It is the United States that controls and distributes the goodies, it is the United States that keeps order, and it is to the United States that these groups will appeal when things go badly. All states are "imagined" in some sense, but the central Iraqi state really is fictional in almost every sense of the word. This said, back in spring I certainly didn't think that it would be possible to reduce violence in Iraq as much as we have. General Petraeus and the US Army deserve some credit for producing and executing a strategy that has substantially reduced violence in Iraq, even if the political goals have not been (and probably cannot be) met. The political end that the United States wanted in Iraq probably isn't that much farther away now than it was a year ago, and violence has dropped substantially over the past four months. Most of the credit for this has to go to the tribal alliance strategy rather than the Surge per se, but that after all was a strategy; we could have continued our efforts to subdue the Sunni tribes and treat them as identical to Al Qaeda, and we didn't. Starting with the assumption that we'll be in Iraq more or less forever, this is about as good as we can expect. Unfortunately, General Petraeus felt the need to overstep his professional bounds and enter the political fray in order to ensure that he would have the capability to execute a strategy that would keep us in Iraq more or less forever... --Robert Farley
