Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering.

... If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it's not working.

The Democrats should not fight Petraeus & Crocker over their answer. They should redefine the question.

Remember Iraq in Fragments.

Seeing Is Believing | Tom Friedman

Rumsfeld was right?

The intervention in Afghanistan has gone far better than that in Iraq largely because the American-led coalition has limited its ambitions and kept a light footprint, leaving the Afghans to run their own affairs.

We need a new strategy that can be applied not only in Iraq but also in Pakistan and wherever else these threats emerge. It should not rely on large amounts of troops and money but on intelligence, pragmatic politics, savvy use of our development assistance and on special forces operations. Rather than throwing more troops at Afghanistan and turning it into a second Iraq, we should use it as a model for a lighter, smarter approach.

See also:

Building hope: An old Etonian in Afghanistan:

Dressed in a Savile Row blazer, Rory Stewart cuts an unlikely figure in the streets of Kabul. But his efforts to restore part of a historical city devastated by war seem to be working.

Where Less Is More, By RORY STEWART

"This isn't just about going in and blowing things up."

US military and civilian authorities must stop thinking of themselves as a "good-idea factory" whose every thought has greater merit than those of their customers.

It could be too late for extensive rebranding of the US effort in Iraq.

Much of what works for consumer advertising in the US might not translate well in Baghdad. But urban ops is all about experimenting and adapting to new realities.

The study is available.

The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue

Francis Fukuyama explains himself to the people of Pakistan.

The road to liberal democracy in the Middle East is likely to be extremely disappointing in the near to medium term, and the Bush administration’s efforts to build a regional policy around it are heading toward abject failure.

To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home.

But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society — that is, a political order characterised by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernisation.

Moreover, the desire to live in a modern liberal democracy does not translate necessarily into an ability to actually do so. The Bush administration seems to have assumed in its approach to post-Saddam Iraq that both democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which societies would revert once oppressive tyranny was removed, rather than a series of complex, interdependent institutions that had to be painstakingly built over time.

Long before you have a liberal democracy, you have to have a functioning state (something that never disappeared in Germany or Japan after they were defeated in World War II). This is something that cannot be taken for granted in countries like Iraq.

... Coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

The history at the end of history — Francis Fukuyama

Mohsin Hamid, author of the forthcoming novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", writes in today's NYT about the developing situation in Pakistan:

General Musharraf now appears to be more concerned with perpetuating his rule than with furthering the cause of “enlightened moderation” that he had claimed to champion. He has never been particularly popular, but he is now estranging the liberals who previously supported his progressive ends if not his autocratic means. People like me are realizing that the short-term gains from even a well-intentioned dictator’s policies can be easily reversed.

General Musharraf must recognize that his popularity is dwindling fast and that the need to move toward greater democracy is overwhelming. The idea that a president in an army uniform will be acceptable to Pakistanis after this year’s elections is becoming more and more implausible.

Pakistan is both more complicated and less dangerous than America has been led to believe. An exaggerated fear of Pakistan’s people must not prevent America from realizing that Pakistanis are turning away from General Musharraf.

Pakistan’s Silent Majority Is Not to Be Feared

Stratfor looks back at major events of the year, touching on Russia, Hamas, Israel, cartoons, Iraq, immigration, China, Somalia, Mexico, Kashmir, Cuba, Lebanon, Thailand, Korea, Venezuela, Britain, and more.

This is a short two-page summary time-line.

STRATFOR's Year in Review for 2006 [PDF]

With the Taliban resurgent, reconstruction faltering, and opium poppy cultivation at an all-time high, Afghanistan is at risk of collapsing into chaos. If Washington wants to save the international effort there, it must increase its commitment to the area and rethink its strategy -- especially its approach to Pakistan, which continues to give sanctuary to insurgents on its tribal frontier.

Get Fareed Zakaria's take on this article in his latest Newsweek column.

Saving Afghanistan - Barnett R. Rubin | Foreign Affairs

Hadley, on Iraq:

"The president said we need to make changes. Some of those changes are going to be significant changes."

I observe how this implies that most of the changes will be insignificant. Deck chairs, if you will. Another interpretation is that Bush will simply cast them as OBE:

... provisions that he can argue are already being implemented ...

I collect these kinds of words and phrases:

"a new way forward" [as opposed to merely sideways]
"as the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea" [he is rather quite partial to the Kool Aid]
"weeks, not months"

Other top officials, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, said the war would last "weeks, not months."

"laundry list" [translation: Rumsfeld in listmaking mode again, on a dreary Saturday morning]
"the right guy" [translation: search for replacement still in progress]
"ambitious" [translation: broken, hopeless, naïve]

See also: Amid Hints Bush Will Change Policy, Clues That He Won’t

From Bush's weekly radio address on Saturday, I liked this:

"[Maliki] wants to show the people who elected him that he's willing to make the hard decisions necessary ..."

Any chance we could catch Maliki making the same comment of Bush?

Our goal ... is to ... build a country that is united, where the rule of law prevails ...

"Amazon eats their own dog food"
"We're adopting the Microsoft methodology to eat your own dog food"
Black LA firefighter recalls how co-workers served him dog food

Kerry, in 2004: I regret to say that the President, who called himself a uniter, not a divider, is now presiding over the most divided America in the recent memory of our country. I've never seen such ideological squabbles in the Congress of the United States. I've never seen members of a party locked out of meetings the way they're locked out today.

The Bush Administration, believing that the treatment of the detainees was a matter that belonged under the exclusive control of the executive branch, was disdainful of attempts by Congress to address the issue. Lindsay Graham: “I went down to Guantánamo with a group of senators shortly after it opened, and Dave Addington [Cheney's counsel] was also on the trip. I remember Dave had a copy of the Constitution he carried around with him. He took it out, and he said the Administration didn’t need congressional authorization for what it was doing. The President had the inherent authority to handle the prisoners any way he wanted. And I said, ‘That may be a good legal argument, but it’s not a good political argument. The more united the nation, the better it is for everyone.’ But Dave said, ‘ Thanks but no thanks.’ And after that we never had much dialogue.” Or, as Specter put it, “We still had discussions with the Department of Defense -- perhaps in part because the general counsel was interested in a judgeship -- but they didn’t go anywhere.”

Bush Plans to Make 'Significant Changes' on Iraq

Do we and Prime Minister Maliki share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq.

The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.

Text of Hadley's Iraq Memo

Silver star, at least.

Sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness.

While the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America’s daunting, imperial-like burdens.

While in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.

The official URL is here, where you can see a photo captioned: "North Korean soldiers in a training exercise, staged in response to a joint military display by the United States and South Korea."

When North Korea Falls, by Robert D. Kaplan | Atlantic Monthly