Perhaps not essential, but quite interesting, and not something you see daily in the papers.

What we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict.

As a recent editorial in The Washington Post observed, five years after September 11 the FBI still has a mere thirty-three experts who speak Arabic — and most of those are far from fluent. The CIA and the Pentagon are not much better off.

On the "hollowing out" that will make stabilization nearly impossible:

The Iraqi authorities have issued two million passports since August 2005. An estimated 40 percent of Iraq's professional classes have left the country. New elites are rising in their place, sometimes through the use of violence; needless to say, this is not the sort of civil society that the Americans were hoping to promote.

Terrorized by horrific acts of bloodshed and torture, and frequently forced to leave behind the businesses that once sustained them economically, they have only the mosques, and their associated political parties, to turn to.

You've seen this before, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As I listened to these Iraqi voices, I could not entirely shake the feeling that we Americans are already becoming irrelevant to the future of their country. While people in Washington continue to debate the next change in course, and the Baker report raises the possibility of gradual withdrawal, Iraqis are sizing up the coming apocalypse, and making their arrangements accordingly.

What happens when the Decider can't make up his mind? We wait until our actions, whether carrots or sticks or both, are merely ambient noise amidst the discordant mix of sectarian signals. Then the debates over withdrawals, troop levels, milestones, methods, etc. are rendered moot. The Iraqis neither wave goodbye nor run us out of town. Ten years later, no one will quite remember exactly when the Americans left -- only that they were irrelevant long before they were absent.