I was talking to a military expert yesterday about Iraq. He said there are couple elements to succeeding in our counterinsurgency efforts: 1) Sealing off the borders, which means insisting on Syria’s help doing so; 2) Getting good intelligence, on the model of what the Israelis managed do against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This requires having the Iraqis on our side and spreading a lot of money around; 3) Learning from what worked for the Brits in Malaysia and for us in Vietnam. In this last connection, my expert mentioned Operation Phoenix, the aggressive campaign to assassinate Viet Cong leaders that was controversial but successful. I’m interested in learning more about Operation Phoenix–perhaps for a column sometime–so please write if you know about it. But any military topic gets a lot of response in The Corner, so please write only if you consider yourself very, very well-informed on the topic and might know good people to talk to. Thanks…