More and more commentators, scholars, analysts, military veterans as well as active duty experts are recognizing that Bush made a HUGE error in subsuming this war into a generational global war on terrorism. The GWOT actually existed since the late Sixties, early Seventies when terrorism reared its head as an international force in the Arab-Israeli struggle and America and other Western nations WERE fighting that war and will continue to fight that war. Combining the preemption doctrine with GWOT has put America into the role of a heightened hegemonic power–in the eyes of even our closest ally Britain (see BBC TV news broadcast coverage and rhetoric about America’s Fourth of July celebrations of July 4, 2007) and more importantly in the eyes of all but a few (Israel, Australia) nations in the world. While our nation certainly needed to reform intelligence and homeland security spending after 9/11, going about it by launching a counter-crusade (to bin Laden’s warped crusade to Islamize the world) was the WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE–it has played into the hands of bin Laden and created an unbelievable push of recrutiment into jidadists camps because of its often extreme and shotgun approach to “defending America.

We’re held from success, though, by a societal legacy from the Hussein era. Over the course of decades of his and his predecessors’ rule, people learned that the best way to stay alive was not to cross the people outside with guns, no matter how distasteful you might find them. Just as people wouldn’t have told the Republican Guards to go to hell, if the Mahdi Army is in the street, people aren’t going to put the stars and stripes in their window — they’re going to quietly look the other way, or even passively support our enemies in order that they might be around to see things get better.

Further, ISF are subject to subversion as insurgents enlist and desertion as people realise they would rather not be a target, on top of the usual headaches that one might expect when assembling a national security apparatus from nothing. They’ve been helped in recent months with the support of traditional tribal leaders, but even then we risk what’s happened in Afghanistan: de facto confederation of regional warlords who claim nominal allegiance to a powerless central government.

The first thing the ISF needs is legitimacy, which can only come about through the establishment of rule of law, a fundamental principle that we take for granted but does not exist in even many of the stable portions of Iraq. You mentioned security forces in Kurdistan as an example; they are committing the same abuses as Hussein’s government, except they answer to a different authority.

Bottom line, stabilising Iraq enough to begin a drawdown of US forces is almost a self-contradiction. Even if 99.5% of Iraqis support us, that still leaves thousands of insurgents; as long as we have insurgents, our troops will have to act first in self-defence, second in peacekeeping; and as long as they are so limited, it will be impossible to engage in the nation-building necessary to create a viable and self-contained sovereign state.

We probably shouldn’t have wandered in to a dark cave with no map, but if we ever want to get out, we’ll have to risk being eaten by the resident bear. And that, unfortunately, means to keep working at the problem until we have progress, at a massive cost.