Luttwak and Sully on Iraq

Edward Lutwak has an excellent Op Ed in the Times today on the situation in Iraq and what the US can't and should do, To Help Iraq, Let It Fend for Itself. Rather than comment on it myself I'm going to direct you over to Andrew Sullivan who does a good job of defending Luttwak's proposal and better late than never shows us that he understands Bush and Iraq in the opening paragraph.

Once the decision was made to foment anarchy in Iraq - a decision made with clear foresight by Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - the chance of Americans to influence events in a country they don't begin to understand was thrown away. The great delusion of the pathetic rearranging of deck-chairs called "the surge" is that we are somehow supposed to believe that four years after we abandoned control of Iraq, we can regain it with a handful of new troops. We can't. A civil war is underway in Iraq to test the real power of the various factions and sects in the country. There will be no peace until such a rebalancing of power is finished. That will mean, alas, ethnic cleansing, more violence, hideous atrocities and the risk of regional war. So be it. It's already under way under American occupation; the only problem is that young Americans are - ludicrously - supposed to police it.

Read the rest.