The relationship between security and reconciliation

I have a lot of respect for thinkers/bloggers/pundits who have educated themselves about Iraq despite starting out with a completely different area of expertise or focus. I mean, four and a half years into war, one would think that everybody could learn the basics -- but many, including plenty of people who comment authoritatively (or "authoritatively"), still haven't made the effort to understand the situation, so those who have deserve credit.

Ezra Klein, whose blog I imagine many AMERICAblog readers frequent, is a health care wonk. He can talk capitation and cost control and coverage -- and even all the topics that don't start with "c"! -- with the best of 'em; in fact, he *is* one of the best of 'em when it comes to that stuff. He also, however, has managed to educate himself about the broad realities of the war in Iraq. This summer, I decided I didn't know nearly enough about what I thought was the most important domestic political issue, health care, so I bought a bunch of books and started reading. But even just getting the basics was hard! So I'm correspondingly impressed when a health wonk recognizes something like this:

The surge sort of dramatized this effect [the damaging and misguided US focus on military focus rather than political efforts] by coinciding with a complete loss of faith in the Maliki government's ability to pursue consolidation: The security situation and the political situation really aren't linked, at least not in that direction. The idea that stability would accelerate reconciliation was always backwards. There's a lack of stability because there's an absence of reconciliation -- and the relationship there is causal.

Right. The idea that you can stop attacks primarily instigated by 1) Sunnis who feel politically marginalized and 2) Shia groups fighting each other for dominance by capturing or killing the fighters is, when you think about it for more than five seconds, absolutely crazy! Terrorists, yes: kill and capture. We don't want to be negotiating with al Qaeda; there's no room for compromise there. But much of the violence in Iraq -- and especially the environment that enables it -- results from the political situation. Which is why the dual idiocy of pretending that violence in Iraq is all about al Qaeda AND trying to "create room for compromise" by escalating our troop presence is so disheartening and wrongheaded. In particular, as Ezra memorably observes,

The surge was like trying to stop someone with a cold from sneezing by pinching their nose really hard. It didn't cure the cold, and it sort of created a mess.

Right now, we have 168,000 US troops enabling corrupt and intransigent governance in a foreign nation that most people still have no conception of nearly five years into war.