I spoke yesterday at the Open Society Institute about the political impact of new media in the Middle East.  Thanks to everyone who showed up, and the great questions and discussions which followed. In many ways it was a pessimistic talk, which pushed back against expectations that new media technologies like blogs, Facebook or Twitter were going to radically change politics in the short or medium term.  Over the longer term, there is a more real transformative potential, especially for the individuals who use the technologies.  But analysts need to not be confused by the bright sparkling lights of fancy new technology or assume that it will have effects independently of the real lines of power and politics. 

Episodes like the failure of the April 6 Facebook strike in Egypt shouldn't really surprise anyone who takes even a cursory look at the structures of power and the limitations of political opposition in that country. But if that's the case, then what should outsiders -- whether the U.S. government, individuals or  NGOs -- really be doing to support such internet activism?  What are the ethics of encouraging risky activism in authoritarian countries where the costs of such actions can be extremely high -- particularly when those doing the encouraging have neither the ability nor the intention of protecting the activists from the consequences?  

Much of my talk would be familiar to regular readers, and I don't want to really repeat it here.  The very short version: politics come first, and that technology alone can have only a very limited impact in the face of authoritarian states.  Where internet activists have had a significant impact in Arab countries, it has usually been tied to distinct political opportunities – such as the Kwuaiti royal transition or elections --- or else led by people who were activists first and used technology as a tool.  New media did help activists in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere to punch well above their weight for a while... but eventually the regimes caught up and the real balance of power showed. 

 I argued that the real impact of political blogging is still likely to lie in the longer term impact on the indivduals themselves, as they develop new political competencies and expectations and relationships.  The impact of the new media technologies will likely be best measured in terms of the emergence of such new kinds of citizens and networks over the next decades, not in terms of institutional political changes over months or years.  The rise of young Muslim Brotherhood bloggers through the ranks of the organization may well change that organization over the years.  Veterans of the Kefaya movement may over time figure out how to create lasting, popular political movements (with or without using new media).   

 A word about Facebook, since it comes up often and gets lots of media attention.  From a political scientist's perspective, the failure of the “Facebookiyin” to organize significant strikes on April 6 this year should have surprised no-one.  I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organizing high-risk political collective action than Facebook.  Joining a group is perhaps the lowest-cost political activity imaginable, involving none of the commitment and dedication necessary to go out to a protest – to say nothing of engaging in the hard work of organizing required for real political activity.  For all their faults, the bloggers of Kefaya were already committed and often experienced political activists ready to pay a certain degree of costs for their activities.  But people who joined Facebook groups? Not so much. Marginally raising the costs of participation, as authoritarian governments can easily do by selectively repressing a few members or beating up some protestors  Its public nature makes it easy for the authorities to identify leaders to repress, or for provocateurs or spies to join up and see what’s in the works.   And finally, Facebook – with its brief Twittery status updates and forum-ish discussion threads – offers less of the ‘public sphere’ potential of blogs.  

 At any rate... here's the question which I posed several times last night:   should we in the West support these internet activists, if we are not prepared to protect them from the consequences of their actions?  This is an issue which has haunted me for years, as I’ve seen a succession of friends and acquaintances assaulted, arrested, harrassed, even tortured for their political activism.  Abd al-Monem Mahmoud, the Muslim Brotherhood blogger, arguably owes his arrest and ongoing legal problems at least in part to the prominence I gave him in an article I wrote for the Guardian (raising his profile in the West enough to make him worth going after by the regime's guys).  He never complained – indeed, he told me that he knew the risks and appreciated the help and the publicity – and neither have any of the other dozens of such activists I've talked to over the years. 

  But that does not alleviate the ethical problem in my view. Neither the United States as a government nor civil society-based supporters of the activists have been able to do much to help them when they run afoul of the authorities.  And the more that they are encouraged to develop political strategies, the more likely they are to run into such problems.  We often have a habit of issuing bad checks to these people, egging them on and encouraging them to take risky actions but then failing to effectively protect them.  If the Facebook groups had actually managed to get people out into the streets earlier this month, what were their fans in the West prepared to do when the police started beating them up and getting them fired from their jobs or expelled from school?  Not much.  If citizen journalists expose corruption in a local government office, who is going to protect them when they are sued for libel or beaten up for their efforts… keeping in mind that they enjoy no legal protections whatsoever as ‘citizen journalists’. 

Take the recent article in World Policy Journal by my friend Mona Eltahawy.  Meant as a celebration of the new generation of internet-based activists, Tahawy’s article sketches a future scenario in which various bloggers emerge as political leaders of their country.  She sketches out a scenario, for instance, in which the Muslim Brotherhood blogger Ibrahim el-Houdaiby (also a friend of mine) returns from his job in Abu Dhabi to take a teaching position at the American University of Cairo and then emerges as the center of  a new political trend demanding effective political reform. In her story, he ends up as Prime Minister.  Thrilling… and, for Houdaybi, the equivalent of painting a bullseye on his forehead.  What could be more threatening to the current Egyptian political leadership than such a scenario, and what would be more likely to prompt them to single out Houdaybi for rough treatment?

 This is not to say that I think that we in the West should back away from promoting political reforms and democratization.  Far from it. Indeed, I’ve argued repeatedly that the United States should insist on the meaningful guarantee of human rights ‘bill of rights’ freedoms such as  freedoms of speech and association and opinion.  I favor human rights and political freedoms conditionality on aid packages to Egypt, Jordan, and any other country which receives U.S. support – and I would make the consequences high (increments of 10% perhaps) and the trigger low (the torture of an unknown blogger should count as much as the harassment of Ayman Nour), and keep the conditions completely unmuddied by unrelated issues (like the policing of the Gaza border).   But the point should be to create the kind of legal and political environments in which internet activists – and all citizens – can operate without fearing the worst consequences, rather than encouraging them to take such risks without any protection.

 But I throw this out for discussion.  What do we owe the activists who we encourage?  What is the best way of paying that debt? 

  I just spent the morning on an unusually interesting panel at the first annual Williams College/H-Diplo conference focused on World Out of Balance, the recent book by Dartmouth University professors Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth.  The other participants were Jeff Legro of the University of Virginia, Randall Schweller of Ohio State University, and Stacey Goddard of Wellesley College.  And it was chaired by my old friend James McAllister of Williams College, who oversaw the whole conference.  All of our reviews will eventually be published at H-Diplo, the vital diplomactic historians' list-serve.  But for now, I just wanted to highlight a few points which came up during the discussion which may be of interest to a wider audience. 

 The core of Brooks and Wohlforth's argument is that American power since the end of the Cold War is so great that it can only be described as unipolarity -- and that this unipolarity has a logic which is not captured by most existing theories of international relations.  There is little reason to expect balancing (of "hard" or "soft" varieties), little incentive to push for alternative international orders, little possibility of the emergence of any peer competitor at the global level, and little reason to expect American primacy to face serious challenge any time soon.   Above all, they argue, there is little evidence that the United States actually faces significant systemic constraints of any kind -- with actual costs associated with balancing, overstretch, reputation, legitimacy or the rest difficult to find.  You can get a taste of their argument here in the current Foreign Affairs.

 The panelists raised a number of serious objections, methodological and theoretical, which you'll see at the H-Diplo roundtable when it's published.   Schweller, for instance, noted that unipolarity is the only system where balancing is a revisionist rather than a status quo preserving strategy, and argued persuasively that challenges to U.S. primacy would likely involve an initial phase of delegitimation and the "practice and discourse of resistance."  Legro pointed to a number of mechanisms which might operate more efficiently than those on which Brooks and Wohlforth focus, including the domestic political impact of American unpopularity abroad and a wider institutionalist logic.  Goddard asked whether balancing quite captured the various ways in which costs might be imposed, whether polarity quite captured the different possible distributions of power, and whether constructivist critiques might cut deeper than the book allows.  

 More than the others, perhaps, I started by noting simply that reading World Out of Balance in April 2009 was a disorienting experience.  At a time of global economic crisis and the emergence of the G-20, the continuing drag of Iraq and the inability of the U.S. to deploy anywhere near the troops necessary for what it claims to want to do in Afghanistan, and the possibility of nuclear proliferation which would transform the importance of U.S. "command of the commons," are the foundations of American material power primacy really so unassailable?  Brooks and Wohlforth, I argued, mount an extremely sophisticated and impressive defense of the endurance of U.S. primacy -- but one which does not seem to match the world in which we currently live.  I suggested that World Out of Balance may face the fate of a masterpiece of IR theory published in 1988 explaining why bi-polarity could never end.   The authors, I suggested, leave the impression of two crafty and battle-hardened knights defending the ramparts of an abandoned fortress. 

 But it's an interesting question. Has American international primacy taken a shattering hit, or is this merely a minor downturn? After all, other potential competitors have been hurt just as badly and the relative balance of power might not be much affected at all.  At the same time, conventional IR theory to the contrary, the absolute loss of capabilities and of leadership ability seems to matter more now than the relative balance.

 What would happen if the U.S. could not longer play the role of unipolar power?  Americans generally have a very difficult time imagining a world without American leadership.  Others may have wider imaginations.  I do not expect a return to multipolarity, as Realists generally focus upon -- though it's worth asking whether China, for instance, may lose interest in a system if it no longer benefits as disproportionately as it has for the last two decades.  But what about a shift to non-polarity, in which neither the U.S. nor anyone else has the capability or the standing to play the role of leading power?  What would such a world look like?  Would it retreat to local balances of power and regional struggles, or would it spark more concerted and effective multilateral cooperation in the face of common problems? 

 All interesting to discuss. The full round-table (including the response by Brooks and Wohlforth) should be available soon for readers to judge the arguments on their merits.  But certainly this is the kind of discussion of an issue of serious policy relevance relying on state of the art International Relations theories and methods which reportedly we don't have any more... 

 I hadn't been planning to post to the blog from the road.  But since Judith McHale was finally officially announced as the nominee for the position of Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, I've been bemused to find myself held up by Jim Glassman and others as the face of the opposition to her appointment.  It's true that I wrote one post on the blog critical of her rumoured appointment... not a campaign, really, but an easy mistake given the obvious, world-shattering power of FP.com blogs! 

 But more seriously, since everyone is quoting the "terrible, terrible pick" line, I guess it's worth going back to that post to emphasize that that my objection was not personal.  I have no reason to believe that she's anything but the smart, tough, and experienced woman that her friends and supporters have described.  My criticism was rooted in one thing: that she had no evident experience or background in what I consider to be a vital part of an effective foreign policy apparatus. Here's what I wrote:

I don't know Judith McHale at all, and obviously have nothing against her personally. But the position of Under-Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs should go to someone with experience in and a vision for public diplomacy, and who will be in a position to effectively integrate public diplomacy concerns into the policy-making process.....  Whoever is appointed as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy needs to be in a position to quickly assert authority over an inter-agency balance currently sharply skewed towards the Pentagon. And that's not even getting into the enormous challenges facing U.S. public diplomacy out there in the real world.

 I didn't think it was so controversial to suggest that, say, heart surgery should be done by a heart surgeon and not by a smart guy who used to watch ER.  But clearly not everyone considers public diplomacy to be heart surgery...

So what do I think now that she's been nominated?   I want her to be confirmed, and quickly. After watching the position stand empty for months, just like so many other important foreign policy positions, we need an Under-Secretary to take the job and get started.   The President and the good folks at the NSC have been exemplary on the public diplomacy front thus far, but they can't do it alone -- they need the kind of sustained, ongoing engagement across all levels which the appropriate State Department agencies can and must provide.

So I hope that McHale is confirmed quickly and can get to work.  And I want her to prove me wrong and emerge as an effective advocate for public diplomacy and serious global engagement.  As for what she might focus upon, I laid out some ideas in this piece for the National a few months ago, and expect to have some more to say about this in a few weeks. 

 

 

 Since I was in a conference all day yesterday, I missed this New York Times report until a friend flagged it for me (See here for Al-Hayat's account):

The top military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said he was filing a lawsuit seeking to close the Baghdad office of Al Hayat, one of the most prominent newspapers in the Arab world, as well as the satellite signal of Al Sharqiya, a popular Iraqi television channel that has been a strong critic of the government. The lawsuit was announced on the Web site of the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraqi security forces in the capital.

The National Media Center of the Council of Ministers criticized local, Arab and international news media on Monday for recent reports about arrests of members of the Awakening Councils. “These attempts by some media to depict wanted persons as heroes targeted by security forces provoke hateful sectarian strife in order to damage Iraqi unity,” the government said in a statement, adding that such reports “make us wonder about the true goals of these campaigns and the groups behind them.”

 That's not a good sign. Reminds me of the bad old days of 2004-2005 when the Iraqi government and MNF-I were routinely attacking the Arab media for fueling the insurgency and the offices of al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations were shuttered.  You would think that they would have learned from the experience of banning al-Jazeera, which didn't prevent it from covering Iraqi politics but did reduce the access that officials had to its airtime.

 Going after al-Hayat is a strange choice.  Al-Hayat is not sensationalist compared to many other Arab sources.   It continues to cover Iraq heavily at a time when both Western and Arab media attention has dwindled;  today's stories include Awakenings leader Ali Hatem's positive response to the Iraqi government's promise to pay their wages and integrate them into the security forces. Like many papers, it's stronger in covering some issues than others, but it has consistently had some of the best coverage of Iraqi politics (perhaps just because it has had some particularly good journalists working there including Mushriq Abbas, or perhaps because Iraq is farther away from the ownership's core concerns in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon).   There may be also be a regional political dimension here in the move against a Saudi-owned paper, as the Iraqi government has evidently been deeply frustrated with Saudi Arabia's continuing foot-dragging on opening an embassy, forgiving debt, and so forth. 

 The most important point, though, is that this would be a serious blow against media freedoms during a crucial period in the consolidation of a new Iraqi political order.   At a time when many Iraqis and Iraq-watchers worry about a creeping authoritarianism in the Maliki government, this move against al-Hayat and al-Sharqiya is a screaming red flag.  Let's hope that it is quickly reversed. 

 I'm giving five talks over the next ten days, and just wanted to quickly announce them here in case anyone living in the appropriate areas wanted to come by.  Hopefully I will have the chance to write up at least some of them here for those who can't.  Here's the schedule of the events which are open to the public.

• April 14, Institute for Middle East Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs (GWU).  I will be speaking in the late afternoon panel (3:30-5:00) on Political Islam in the Contemporary Gulf, along with two of the best young scholars on the subject --  Thomas  Hegghammer (lately of Jihadica) and Stephane Lacroix.
• April 16, Williams College.  Vietnam and Iraq:  Lessons for Withdrawal, a joint discussion with the esteemed historian Frederik Logevall.  I'm quite excited to be going back to my old school, seeing old friends, and taking part in an event with someone from my PhD alma mater.  7:30, Griffin Hall.
• April 18, Williams College/ H-Diplo Conference on New Scholarship in American Foreign Relations.  I will be on a morning panel with Randy Schweller, Jeff Legro, Stacey Goddard, and  James McAllister discussing World Out of Balance, the important new book on the durability of American primacy by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth.  Also Griffin Hall.
• April 21.  Open Society Institute, New York.  I will be speaking on "The Political Impact of New Media in the Middle East" -- an issue near and dear to my heart these days -- hosted by Mohamad Bazzi (from NYU and formerly of Newsday) and organized by my new FP.com colleague Evgeny Morozov.  6:00-8:00 PM, at the OSI office. 

Look forward to seeing any readers from those areas at the events!  For the rest, just a warning that blogging will be hostage to the usual road-trip tandem of internet access and insomnia.

 Like most people who follow Iraq, I've been watching the mounting tensions surrounding the Awakenings and the uptick in violence with some concern.   I don't think that we're seeing the "great unravelling" quite yet, nor that we're yet seeing a return to higher levels of violence, insurgency and civil war.   But the increased violence and the growing chorus of complaints about the failures of political accommodation should be a cautionary note to the Iraqi government and to the major political players that time is running out to make the crucial political power-sharing agreements necessary before American troop withdrawals pick up their pace.

 The arrest of a leading Awakenings figure by Iraqi Security Forces which led to a highly-publicized military standoff a few weeks ago is only one instance of a wider pattern.  Tensions surrounding that arrest were exacerbated by an inflammatory blizzard of statements by Maliki and others warning that the Awakenings had been infilitrated by Baathists and al-Qaeda.  A series of attacks by unknown groups have added to the tension.  It all adds up to a general sense of apprehension, with members of the Awakenings worried about their future and many others worried that the security situation may be on the brink.

 The situation is extremely murky, and it's hard to really know anything with confidence.  What I've been seeing in the Iraqi and Arab media, and hearing from the people I've spoken with, is a wide range of competing interpretations and arguments over everything from the identity of the attackers (al-Qaeda? rival Awakenings groups? Shi'a militias looking to stir things up?) to the intentions of the Iraqi government (eliminate the Awakenings?  weed out the 'bad elements' within them? force the U.S. to take sides, and test the U.S. implementation of the SOFA?).  The high level of uncertainty and confusion is itself a significant point -- the impact of fear and uncertainty on strategic calculations should never be underestimated.

 Given all that uncertainty, it would be unwise to offer a confident assessment of what's really going on.  But the emerging crisis surrounding the Awakenings and the uptick in violence do both seem to be primarily driven by the continuing refusal of Maliki and the Iraqi government to make meaningful political accommodations and their decision to move against at least some of the Awakenings groups at a convenient moment.  

 The official moves against the Awakenings look like salami tactics, divide and rule rather than a full-scale assault. Maliki, as in the past, seems quite happy to work with parts of the Anbar Awakenings (talk of a political deal with Ahmed Abu Risha is in the air again) even as he moves against Awakenings elsewhere.  Maliki's government sees very clearly how fragmented, mutually mistrustful and competitive the Awakenings are.  They are likely gambling that this fragmentation creates such intense coordination problems that they can take out a few of their most dangerous potential enemies here and there without triggering a widespread Sunni uprising.  Watching the reaction of the various Awakenings thus far -- as some protested angrily but others cheered -- suggests that they are right.  It's a dangerous game, though.  The question would be whether there is some tipping point, at which a large number of uncoordinated and self-interested small groups suddenly switch sides (as arguably happened in the other direction in the spring of 2007).

 It would not take a revolt en masse for a change in the status of the Awakenings to have an effect on security.  In a recent interview with al-Arabiya, Salah al-Mutlaq warned that the government's failure to deliver on its promises of security and civil jobs to the Awakenings and the arrest of a number of Awakenings leaders were spreading fear and uncertainty through their ranks. Members who aren't getting paid, see their leaders targeted, and see diminishing prospects of future payoffs could begin to fade away. They could stop performing their local security functions, allowing violent groups easier access to areas which had been off-limits for the last year or two.   Or some could return to violent action in an individual capacity -- and even if only 10% went that route, that could put 10,000 hardened fighters back into play (in addition to people recently released from the prisons, another issue which factors in here).

 The crackdown on the Awakenings has regional implications as well, particularly with the ever-skeptical Saudis who have generally supported the Awakenings movements.  The Arab press has taken careful note of their reversal of fortunes, which Adel al-Bayati in al-Quds al-Arabi calls Maliki's coup against the Awakenings.  Tareq al-Homayed, editor of the Saudi daily al-Sharq al-Awsat (which usually reflects official Saudi thinking), complains bitterly today that recent events have made his warnings from last August about the coming betrayal of the Awakenings come true.  The Awakenings were not bearing arms against the Iraqi state, argues Homayed, but rather were protecting the Iraqi state against al-Qaeda and assisting its stabilization ahead of the American withdrawal. But, he warns, narrow, sectarian perspectives in Baghdad are winning out over the Iraqi national interest with potentially devastating consequences. 

 This reflects a theme which extends beyond the Saudi sphere. Most Arab writers (for example, the Kuwaiti Shamlan Issa in al-Ittihad yesterday) point the finger at the continuing lack of progress on political accomodation and national unity -- which for them, generally means the accommodation of Sunni interests and the integration of the Awakenings.  The "resistance camp" paper al-Quds al-Arabi has been covering the "coup against the Awakenings" as closely as have the Saudi-owned media (though with a bit more schadenfreude). Many of them are reading the crackdown on the Awakenings through as unmasking the "true Shia sectarianism" of Maliki's government -- reinforcing their pre-existing, deep skepticism about the new Iraq.  

 I'm obviously worried about all of this.  I've been warning about the potential for trouble with the Awakenings project for a long time, and it would be easy to say that those predictions are now coming due.  But I think it's way too early for that -- there is still time for these troubles to demonstrate the costs of political failure and to become the spur to the needed political action. 

 That's why it's really important that the United States not now begin to hedge on its commitment to the drawdown of its forces in the face of this uptick in violence.  It is in moments like this that the credibility of commitments is made or broken.  Thus far, the signals have been very good -- consistent, clear, and tightly linked to continuing pressure on political progress.  President Obama reportedly pushed hard on the political accommodation front during his stopover in Baghdad last week, and General Odierno did very well to emphasize on CNN yesterday that the U.S. is firmly committed to removing its troops by the end of 2011.    Maliki and everyone need to take deep breath and strike power sharing deals before things go south, and understand that they will pay consequences if they don't.  

 Just a quick note for those in the DC area who might be interested:  on Tuesday, April 14, GWU's Institute for Middle East Studies will be hosting an all-day conference on "Politics and Society in the Contemporary Gulf."  It's at the Elliott School, 6th floor, from 11-5. Here's the lineup:

11a.m. - 12:30 p.m. - Migrant Communities in the Contemporary Gulf

Panelists: Michele Ruth Gamburd, Portland State University
Sharon Nagy, DePaul University
Attiya Ahmad, Duke University

12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. - Lunch

1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. - Political Economy of the Contemporary Gulf

Chair: Marc Lynch

Panelists: Kristin Smith Diwan, American University
Michael Herb, Georgia State University
Scheherazade Rehman, George Washington University

3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. - Political Islam in the Contemporary Gulf

Chair: Nathan Brown

Panelists:Marc Lynch, George Washington University
Thomas Hegghammer, Harvard University
Stephane Lacroix, Institut d’Etudes Politiques - Paris

It will be followed at 6:00 by Ambassador Skip Gnehm's annual Kuwait Lecture, focused on the search for a new balance in the Gulf.  

While I'm in advertising mode, also put this on your calenders:  on April 29 at 6 PM, I'll be chairing a panel at GWU previewing the Iranian June elections.  It features Mohammed Tabaar, Karim Sadjapour, and Paola Rivetti. 

I'm really excited  about both of these -- hope to see many of you there!

 

 

 

 

 Obama's surprise stop-over in Baghdad, following his impressive performance in Turkey, again hit the right notes. He demonstrated his continuing commitment to the American effort in Iraq, while strongly affirming his intention of carrying out the withdrawal of troops by the end of 2011. He pushed hard on Maliki, by all accounts, to move on reconciliation and to take advantage of the closing window of the American troop presence to secure a workable political accomodation.  The message he's sending is the right one:  American troops can not be the answer to Iraq's problems, they really are leaving, and it's now up to the Iraqis -- whether things go well or they go badly. 

 I think that it's hard for a lot of American commentators to really internalize this, because they are so firmly anchored in a U.S. military centric concept of the war where American strategy, troop levels, and will are what matters most. That, I suspect, is what animates the steady drumbeat of pessimism from my colleague Tom Ricks and many others.  They have lived this war from the American side, embedded with American troops and American politicians and American debates in which Iraqis are viewed too often as passive recipients of American strategy or as problems to be managed. I understand it, but it seems evident that Obama really is thinking differently. 

 Do I think that the war is over and that Iraq's problems have been solved?  No, no, no.   For years I've been pointing out the fragility of the political situation, and I've seen little to change my mind.  You can see it in the crackdown on the Awakenings leaders in Fadhil and elsewhere (which highlight the coordination problems among the deeply fragmented Awakening ranks as much as they do the Maliki government's continuing suspicion and hostility). You can see it in the intense struggles between Arabs and the Kurds, and between a centralizing Maliki regime and a hopelessly fragmented group of opposing factions.  You can see it in the perennial gap between political agremeents and their implementation, in the continuing incapacity of state institutions, in the endemic corruption and in the current budget struggles. And you can see it in the uptick in bombings and insurgency violence.  No, Iraq's internal struggles and problems won't be over for a long, long time. 

But that's not the same thing as saying that America's war in Iraq will continue for a long, long time.  I take Obama's commitment to drawing down seriously, and so --- increasingly -- do many Iraqis and those in the region.  It isn't that the war is "over"... it's that the American role is fundamentally going to change.   As American troops withdraw and Iraqi sovereignty cystallizes, something else I've been arguing for years will become ever more central:  a solution which depends on American troops to enforce it is not a solution.   Americans, as much as Iraqis, need to adapt to this credible commitment to the drawdown of U.S. troops.  

 There's a long way to go, and I'm as pessimistic as ever.  Iraqis may well make bad decisions, and the chances of a return of the insurgency are real. But I'm reassured by the evidence of this changing approach across the administration and MNF-I alike, as the new reality sinks in. I'm reassured by the continuing commitment to withdrawal despite the security deterioration (taking place, I would add, despite the continuing high level of U.S. troops -- which once again really is not the decisive variable). And I'm reassured by Obama's regional approach to the issue, just as promised during the campaign.   It isn't going to be easy, but I think that Obama has things on the right course.