Stratfor, as always, is very good. However, it underestimates the extent to which are committed to making Iraq into a viable state with progress towards democracy, and therefore the strategic debacle of abandoning Iraq to civil war without a stronger effort to crush the insurgency. And it overestimates the element of choice involved: we could not abandon Iraq to chaos after invasion, no on had the stomach for a long term occupation, and we could not avoid civil war without a constitutional solution backed by internal security forces, allowing us to demobilize the main body of our forces in the country. So it was inevitable that "democratization" would become a stated goal, and that complete failure would be a strategic setback.
The crucial problem of "moles" is well- cited. However, it presupposes a bottomless insurgency, which I think is a mistake. What is more important is our training of intelligence and special ops forces, and whether we can vet them better than the overt operations forces. In my opinion, that is what is really taking so long, getting agents and commandos that we trust and who are very well trained "on line". I do not believe that the insurgency can survive against a well- trained network of spies and informants backed by special ops forces. |
