called "what to do in Iraq" which may be of interest to readers of this forum. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to provide provision for uninvited readers to post comments - and is also a bit hard to navigate.
The people contributing are Stephen Biddle, Larry Diamond, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, Kevin Drum and Marc Lynch. I've just browsed it briefly but posting the link now so others can take a look.
I'll paste in one of Hitchens' postings below and perhaps add others and some comments of my own when I have time to get back to it.
Hitchens:
I am again a little dispirited at the absence of the historical
dimension from many of these postings, or by its appearance only in the
form of false analogy. There is nothing remotely comparable here with
the experience of the French in Algeria and Indochina, or with the
experience of the United States in Indochina, let alone that of the
Israelis in Lebanon. The United States has not claimed territory in
Iraq, as the French did in Algeria: it is not the inheritor of a
bankrupt French colonialism, as Eisenhower and Kennedy were in Vietnam;
and it is not pursuing a vendetta, as was Sharon in Lebanon.
It is, instead, in a situation where no superpower has ever been
before. The ostensible pretext for American intervention — the
disarmament of a WMD-capable rogue state and the overthrow of a
government aligned with international jihadist gangsterism — was in my
opinion based on an important element of truth rather than on a
fabrication or exaggeration. But the deeper rationale — that of
altering the regional balance of power and introducing democracy into
the picture— is the one that must now preoccupy us more. The United
States is in Iraq for its own interests, to ensure that a major state
with a chokehold on a main waterway of the global economy is not run by
a barbaric crime family or by its fundamentalist former allies and
would-be successors. But it is also there to release, and not repress,
the numberless latent grievances of Iraqi society. And—something
surprisingly forgotten by many who fetishize the United Nations—it is
there under a UN mandate for the democratization and reconstruction of
the country.
It was to be expected that the forces of reaction would try to sabotage
the process of resolving Iraqis' grievances by democratic and federal
means, and it is true that this menace was underestimated. Where, I
wonder, have we not underestimated the sheer viciousness of this enemy,
and its willingness to destroy states and societies rather than allow
them to be even partly democratic or secular? We are underestimating it
in Darfur — which has been handled a la Kofi Annan, presumably to the
satisfaction of the so-called "multilateralists" — even as I write. We
are in the process of ignoring its challenge in Nigeria, and also of
downplaying its attempt to destroy the all-important multi-ethnic
democracy of India (where the United States has an alliance of both
principle and interest).
If there is an Algerian analogy at all, it would be to the war waged by
Salafist fanatics against the FLN government during the 1990s. Based
initially on a far wider public support than anything enjoyed by the
Baathists and bin Ladenists of Iraq, this insurgency was eventually
defeated by two things. The first was the strategic majority that was
eventually mobilized, consisting of the urban secular middle class,
many of the Berber/Kabyle population, women, and a crucial section of
the armed forces. The second was the nature of the insurgency itself,
which resorted to the takfir mania of declaring all its foes to be
apostates, and which imploded as a result of the war on civilians that
it conducted. The Algerian authorities employed tactics we would
not—and should not—allow ourselves to use, but there should still be a
much closer study of the way in which this victory was accomplished.
I repeat what I said in my first posting: The United States can
contemplate leaving Iraqis to settle their sharp internal differences
by themselves, but it cannot abandon them to a victory for clerical and
political fascism and has its own reasons for demonstrating that such a
threat can be met, engaged, and defeated. Those who believe, or
half-believe, that the insurgency is produced by the Coalition presence
are deceiving themselves, and have paid no attention to the countries
where such tactics are used against the population in the absence of
any Western involvement or even concern.
At present, then, the United States is acting as a militia for the
majority of Iraqis who do not have a militia of their own. (It is not
without significance that when sectarians are found operating private
or semi-official squads and prisons, the victims take their complaints
to the Green Zone.) Clearly, this cannot become a long-term dependent
relationship. My chief worry, however, is of the opposite type, and was
mentioned by Marc Lynch. If our calculations become unduly inflected by
considerations of American domestic opinion, then both Iraqis and
foreign intruders (and their state backers in Iran, Syria and Saudi
Arabia) have only to set their watches and begin making their
respectively pessimistic and gloating dispositions. We thus condition
the outcome without much influencing it.
A possible solution — ask the Iraqis what should be done — is
insufficiently canvassed. As a means of concentrating all minds, one
could either propose a vote in the Iraqi parliament, or a national
referendum, on the single question of a date for withdrawal to begin.
Much might be learned from the analysis of the results, and we could
remind people again that Iraq is the only country in the region, apart
from Lebanon, where citizens are regularly called to the polling-booth.
This was part of the point to begin with.