He has written some compelling stuff lately. In this recent post, he makes a point about the centrality of Iraq’s broken culture to our troubles there, a point that is often lost in some of the more simple-minded neo-con/liberal Rumsfeld-bashing: “Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot. The Iraqis, after all, still would have had the final say.”