Manging the Barbarians

[SteveMetz]

Ski

Good post but I would say we have taken sides and not always recognized that we were in fact doing so. We have certainly accomodated the Kurdish side all along. We took the Shia side early on under the rubric of reconciliation when it was anything but that. Now we are in bed with the Sunnis of all sides.

Best

Tom

In my Rethinking Insurgency monograph (I know, I know--but I haven't plugged it for several days), I contend that our inclination to identify "bad guys" and "good guys" in counterinsurgency is a legacy of the Cold War (and of the difficulty Americans have dealing with ethical ambiguity) that serves us badly today. It complicates any resolution short of outright victory which is, itself, unattainable against networked, self-funding, terrorism-based insurgencies. Moreover, when we sell a counterinsurgency campaign to the American public as one that pits good guys against bad guys, public support erodes when, as invariably happens, our partners turn out to be less than pure of heart.

Hence I think that either a "managing the barbarians" or, to put a softer edge on it, a peacemaking/peacekeeping approach is more attuned to today's realities than is the kind of 1960s conceptualization of counterinsurgency that we still cling to.