Yet another half-baked idea ripped from the draft of my book. This one popped up last night while laying in bed waiting for the Lunesta to knock me out.

When conventional war looms, a state can convince itself that it was the victim of unjustified or unprovoked aggression, thus engaging in armed conflict with a clean conscious (whether truly warranted or not). Counterinsurgency is different. By definition, an insurgency cannot form, consolidate, and continue unless the state has fundamental shortcomings.

When the United States provides counterinsurgency support to a friendly regime, Washington must convince its partner that it has serious political, economic, social, and security sector problems that have to be addressed. This is hard enough. But in Iraq, the United States itself was the regime so to be successful at counterinsurgency, it had to admit that it (or, at least, its policies and approaches) were flawed.

During the vital first year of the insurgency, the 2004 American presidential election loomed. This made it almost impossible for the Bush administration to make the sort of admission of guilt that would have allowed it to implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy. And this would have been used as political ammunition against it. So all it could do was downplay the challenge, deny policy failure and, to an extent, lay the blame on the military, at least until after the election.