Maybe it’s not our business to decide whether Sunni’s and Shias and Kurds (oh my!) should live on the same block. Hard to create a centralized state of Democracy in a culture that has always been held together with an iron fist, or robed arms. When our soldiers can’t tell friend from foe, or the enemy one week becomes the enemy’s enemy, we cannot stand down because they are too busy sneaking up. You watch videos that our troops post online ( that they were allowed too before the ban) and most of the footage makes your blood run cold.These are not the young Replicans sweating in 100+ heat. This should have been at the forefront of the plan, rather than the dog and pony show that Cheney and Bush have used to exploit this for their own misbegotten use.
To compare Iraq to WW2 and VN is completely false.
, misleading and typical of our presidunce.

But if we accept your premise and go the Bosnia model then we need to come out and call for a tripartite partition of Iraq. If that’s the goal then internal displacement is a necessary (if painful) conjunction. But as far as I can see, the official US policy is NOT separation of Iraq into separate countries but rather creation of a centralized state. Given the current strategy, internal displacement is a sign of failure, not success.

The use of metrics to measure success in war is a classic example of this.

In the Boer War, the British suffered over 20 thousand dead – the Boers under 10 thousand. Thus, of course, the Boers must have won.

I944 was the worst year of the Second World War for the Allies in terms of casualties. Thus, of course, the Allies were losing in 1944.

It is ironic that the Brookings Institute, and the anti-war Left, is resorting to the same pie-chart, body-count metrics as did McNamara and Co. in the Vietnam War.

Different wars, different agendas, same damned statistics.

(1) Kevin Drum’s metrics are meaningless. Case in point, apply the same Violence and Infrastructure metrics to the Second World War. By Kevin Drum’s metrics, in early 1945 – after the bloodbaths of Iwo Jima, D-day, Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge, given the Allies’ staggering losses and the annihilation of Infrastructure on all sides (except the continental US) – the Allies were desperately losing World War Two.

Body counts and civilian bombings do not measure success in war.

(2) All time high internal displacement = US failure.
The two undeniably successful counter-insurgencies of the past century – the British in the BoEr War and in the Malayan “Emergency” – were characterized by massive displacement of civilians. In the Malayan counter-insurgency, the British displaced hundreds of thousands into camps.

In both cases, the British won.

Displacement has been a core technique of successful counter-insurgency ever since. The fact that it is occurring in Iraq may thus not be a sign of disaster. Stability did not come to the Balkans until the warring populations were separated…and it will not likely come to Iraq until the Sunni, Kurd and Shi’a populations are separated.