WHAT NEXT IN IRAQ?

There was a time when I was more than willing to accept the WW2 analogies. But the time for that kind of rhetoric is surely long gone. New Republic editor Peter Beinart - no dove on the question of overthrowing Saddam - has written a chastening guide to the different ways of solving what looks like the insoluble:

[The] debate is a choice between last-ditch efforts that will probably fail and simply accepting defeat and mitigating its effects. It's the choice you face when someone teeters on the edge of death--between aggressive measures that might produce a miracle but could also increase the agony, and letting the patient go, in the hopes that, by bowing to the inevitable, you can at least ease the pain.

Here's what Beinart has to say about the merits of the "do it right" counter-insurgency strategy where US troops plant themselves in urban areas and undercut the militias by providing basic security. I used to think it would work:

Many people agree that, once upon a time, this would have been a good strategy. But that time may now have passed. For starters, to effectively protect Iraqis the United States would need many more troops. And adding any more would put a brutal strain on an already wheezing U.S. military. [Strategist Kenneth] Pollack and company believe you can make headway without more U.S. troops, but that requires Iraqi forces to make up some of the gap, and there is no guarantee they can. After all, the more Iraq's communities turn on each other, the less Sunnis will rely on Shia soldiers for protection. And, even as Iraqis grow more hostile to one another, they are also growing more hostile to us... All of which may explain why Army Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, has put in place elements of exactly the strategy the wonks are pushing, and yet violence in Baghdad keeps escalating.