Mark Helprin's Neo-Realism on Iraq

from the current issue of National Review ODT:

Although in guerrilla war control of territory guarantees little, after three and a half years we are not even safe in the Green Zone. Our civil projects, ambitious and elementary alike, are rotting and abandoned. With his left hand, the enemy continues to inflict upon us the steady accumulation of almost 3,000 American dead, while with his right he fights a savage civil war that we cannot stop, and arms for conventional battles to come.

Our combat arms are demoralized, our downwardly adjusted recruitment goals often unmet, our staple military strengths diminished as we suppress and neglect funding and upkeep, and our allies are leaving from embarrassment that we should fail and proclaim success nonetheless.

What might we do now that the patient is nearly dead? Fear of Iran forces us to resist the division of Iraq even as it divides before our eyes, but the Persians have not moved west since ancient times. Long lines of supply, mountains, deserts, and the whole of the Arab world have and will prevent this: Our air power alone could stop the Iranian military from such an extension.

Thus we should let Iraq divide according to natural equilibrium as inevitably it will, remount our armies, and base them in the desert safe from insurgency and able to reach Baghdad, Damascus, and Riyadh quickly and in strength to liquidate regimes that will not otherwise be coerced to eliminate the terrorists within their borders. Such regimes are or would be police states that could and — because they live to rule — would do so were we to imperil their existence. It is what we should have done in the first place, although it is now very late in the game.