Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
In Ali Soufan's commentary yesterday in The Guardian there is this phrase, which I think explains why there is no exit strategy:

So each year we start again. The 'Long War' is here. Needless to say Soufan writes more:http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ars?CMP=twt_gu
Two things here stand out to me...

But the real work starts where it should have in 2001, with true grassroots opposition – a true comprehensive strategy – that is managed by regional powers and supported by the international community. This will work if regional governments don’t co-opt Obama’s plan to advance their own divisive agendas.
The problem here is that regional governments will co-opt the plan to advance their own divisive agendas. That's inevitable, and there is no realistic way that the US or anyone else can prevent it.

And the underlying issues – of education systems rooted in indoctrination and the suffocation of critical discourse, corruption so pervasive that it has become endemic, oppression of women that has robbed society of their contributions, and an absence of political representation that has served as the fuel of extremism – have been ignored by most governments across the near east, making it inevitable for any spark to cause a conflagration that would prove impossible to extinguish.
This goes back to the argument from governance. It's an appealing argument in some ways: it is certainly true that if these countries were well governed, many of these problems would be much easier to manage. It's also a distinctly frustrating argument, because these countries are not well governed, and the US can neither govern them nor compel them to change the way they govern themselves.