Given that strengthening a military they view as their enemy strengthens their resistance creates political problems — the first thing we need to do is slow down, rather than speed up.

Unfortunately the nature of this conflict is that we’re going to have to stay there longer than we would like.

There are some Americans out there who would like to hope that something good can come out of this.

Most of us overemphasize hardware over software. The IED threat is going to be solved tactically.

They say we have to be perfect at everything at the same time. We can’t afford to be perfect at everything…. There’s a fixed size of the pie.

Iraq’s Sunnis perceive the ‘national’ army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids.

Right now the policy in Iraq is to stay until and unless the national military is capable of waging war on its own.

Removing the United States from the scene means eliminating the player most loyal to the idea of a stable, heterogeneous Iraq.

Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.

It represents a misreading of the nature of the problem. When we make these forces stronger, we make the underlying problem worse, not better. We’re throwing gas on the political fire.

Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces . . . threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it.

I think it is probably a good general description of American foreign policy that we don’t have as much control as we think we do.