The Kaleidoscopic War
A number of important articles on Iraq have appeared in the past few weeks:
- Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on the stirrings of a return to normal life in Baghdad
- Tom Ricks, of the Post, on the failure of the Iraqi government to take advantage of these stirrings
- Jon Lee Anderson, of The New Yorker, on the Americans’ dubious new allies in Baghdad
- Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, of The Guardian, on the same
- Steven Lee Myers and Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on Washington’s scaled-back plans for political unity in Iraq
- Patrick Healy, of the Times, on how the Democrats are responding to better news out of Iraq
- Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on the beginning of the end of the surge
- Michael Gordon, of the Times, on military strategy after the surge
- Marc Lynch, of the blog Abu Aardvark; Brian Katulis, of the Center for American Progress; and Colin Kahl, of the Center for a New American Security, debate post-surge strategy
Read them all if you have time. The question of what’s happening in Iraq is always hard to answer, and so is the related question of what the U.S. can and should do. But it’s clear that the war has entered a new phase—as usual, a few steps ahead of our understanding, and unanticipated by almost everyone on the American side of the looking glass. Does anyone know how to take advantage of the changing situation? Do any of the plans out there still make sense? I’ll come back to this later in the week.
