JD, I agree completely with you. After all, assuming that an Iraqi population is going to continue to exist in Iraq, and we are one day to leave, the only thing we can live behind are institutions based on our values and ideas. There can be no "victory" without this.

For example, when Britain left India, they left behind their institutions, a civil service, and their values which still exist today as the fight in Pakistan between the High Court and the military is showing today.

To my mind, the use of hard power in an insurgency is to defend the population, and especially the opinion leaders, from insurgents, so that ideas can spread, and the possibility of adopting Western patterns of behaviour (such as democracy) becomes thinkable, in that the consequences of the voicing of such sentiments is no longer a certain death at the hands of the insurgents.

The problem of winning an insurgency situation then reduces to:

1. What are the ideas, values, beliefs we wish to take hold and how do we model and promote them?

2. How is our military force going support the modeling and promotion of our ideas, values and beliefs?

You can then "chunk" the problem down from there.

The policy blunders that have me tearing my hair out for the last five years all relate to our complete failure to model and promote our belief system (absent the one "purple finger" episode), starting by living up to it ourselves, in all our actions, even at cost to ourselves.

To put it another way, why would an Iraqi sign up to a new and unfamiliar system of Government that admits the possibility of torture (waterboarding), detention without trial (Guantanamo, rendition), and a lack of personal privacy (FISA)? These things may have "saved" us from further attacks (although personally I doubt it), but at the cost of completely undermining our credibility as the high priests of Freedom, Liberty and Human Rights, and without that status, what are we offering Iraqis that Saadam didn't offer them?