The Center for Naval Analyses has just released a report on "Managing Civil Strife and Avoiding Civil War in Iraq." A senior military analyst emails his take after reviewing the report:
There are two interesting things about this report, in my view. First, although the panelists identified the power vacuum [see here for more on the roots of this vacuum) as the greatest factor contributing to the rise of militias on both sides, they assume, apparently without much discussion, that the US can do nothing to fill this vacuum. Second, they focus almost entirely on recommending solutions that rely on improvements in things we have the least control and leverage over. It would be great to "professionalize" the Iraqi Police and turn the Ministry of the Interior around, to make sure that Army and Police units are not identified according to sect, that talented people are promoted at all levels, etc. But these are not the sort of things you can order to be done anyway, and they rely entirely on the sovereign Iraqi government to do them. It hasn't done them so far because a) it can't, and b) it doesn't want to. The discussion about what to do in Iraq is spinning off into never-never land as people focus ever more on irrelevant theories and propose solutions that can't be implemented. We need to help restore the discussion to reality, and that starts by identifying the things we can effect and the things we can't. One of the reasons I'm always pushing for troops to establish security is because that's something we can do directly. It does not require transformations in Iraqi government and society that will come only slowly, if at all. This problem affects the way many people think about the GWOT [Global War on Terror], too. We focus heavily on basic, fundamental social, economic, and sociological problems that we really can't hope to fix in any reasonable time frame or possibly at all, and ignore solutions that rely on our capabilities for action. What I propose is called looking for nails--but it really is true that, from the standpoint of making any sort of short-term progress in a disastrously collapsing situation, we really do only have a small collection of hammers.
This piece by Dexter Filkins in today's New York Times seems to confirm much of the above.