Steve Metz said:

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.
(Emphasis added / kw)
Seems to me the terrible truth of the item I placed in bold added to the fact that our egos in high places insist on reinventing the wheel instead of learning from history that this approach:
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.
Would be no more likely to succeed. The American psyche is perfectly prepared to slam anyone onto the mat and jump on their rib cage; it is not prepared for classic wrestling with the world media as a referee. As Steve points out, in a tag team match with everyone in black trunks, we'd have difficulty sorting out who to slam.

Not to mention that our national impatience means that long term stability ops are not going to sit well. The 1/3 Rule and the Two Year Rule draw a lot of snickers but I've never seen anyone really refute either. Add to that the facts that we have to be a full spectrum force with multi mission capability, that we are not going to develop an advisory corps, SOF is not likley to undergo an expansion and the Defense budget is going to get whacked and we had better look at a way to use the GPF to max advantage...

Ski said:
Tom

What you say might be true, but I equate that to not taking sides at all.

Sun Tzu said "The ancient philospher Master Guan said, "Go forth armed without determining strategy, and you will destroy yourself in battle.
Adding that to Steve's thoughts and given the fact that taking no side is, in a great many if not most cases, the best approach (due to all the factors Steve cited among others), it would appear to me the best strategy would be to avoid entanglements in most forms unless there is absolutely no alternative because as Tom said:
There is a real difference between not taking sides as in remaining neutral and taking all sides in the interest of appearing to be balanced. The first is the peackeeping mode and is tough to do but it can work. The second is even harder and rarely succeeds. It does however tend to piss all sides off when poorly executed.
Given several failures in foreign policy over the last 60 or so years plus the fairly good strategic idea in Iraq that was badly flawed in execution and therefor is not likely to produce a result as good as might have been hoped (Tom's "...even harder..." approach), our ability to interject in the affairs of others for the near future might be better curtailed and a strategy of some small but highly effective direct action, area tailored advisory and assistance capabilities -- say a MilAssistAdvisoryCom for each CoCom, working with the SOComs -- plus low key SF led ID and, most importantly an announced policy of "We'll play nice as long as everyone else does. If someone elects not to, we'll come in and smash everything, a process at which we excel. Oh -- and we don't do windows and we don't house-sit but we may help pay for the clenup" might be a far better approach.

Diplomatically worded, it would sound better, but I tend to get long winded so that's the country version.

The foregoing should be considered not only on the premise of domestic political probabilities but on the realities of todays rapid and efficient worldwide communications capability, the international scene and the globalization effect on commerce and the world economy. We no longer drive that train...