According to Floppy, Grim "takes apart" the editorial. Witness the disassembly:

So, the first point was that we have a divided Shi'ite faction. The second is that Iran is backing some of the groups, the ones causing us these particular problems. That implies a COIN solution from the principle of disaggregation: the others are natural allies of ours, because we have a common enemy in Iran. Rather than having the Shi'ites turning against us, and having to fight the majority of the populace (or withdraw), we have a much simpler problem: we need to balance the situation on the ground in the favor of the faction that will find us to be allies, and help them win the control of the Shi'ite faction that Iran seeks for its proxies.

Their conclusion that this is a clusterfuck is undermined by the fact that we never said that clusterfucking an entire region was going to be easy.

There are elements of Jimbo's response that may become the official war blogger narrative:

"Honor the service of these junior members of the military while ignoring their arguments that go to strategic issues, since as junior member of the military they are in charge of tactics and are not allowed to have strategic arguments or conclusions.

And don't forget they're junior. And not at all strategic, unlike us."

- mark 8-20-2007 10:24 pm