Jonah: Nope, don’t care whether Iraqis “choose our side” or not. And I believe the American people have a much higher tolerance than you think for bloobaths caused by our giving up on people who–I think the American people would say–were so intrinsically hopeless, we had no choice but to give up on them. The American people barely turned a hair at Pol Pot. And I must say, your ruthlessness seems pretty tame to me. REAL ruthlessness is what Winston Churchill (disapprovingly) called “frightfulness.” I think you’d have to conclude, looking back after the last century or so, that modern Anglo powers simply don’t do “frightfulness”–not as a land-war tactic, anyway: the city-flattening air raids of WW2 were in a category of their own. The Brits tried the well-proven Roman-Ottoman style counterinsurgency tactics in Ireland (the Black and Tans) and India (Amritsar–that was Churchill’s context), and discovered they had no stomach for it. That’s why Ireland and India are independent. I doubt we have the stomach either. The very interesting question, raised by Luttwak and others, is then: Does any other kind of counterinsurgency work? I think both a priori considerations of human nature and the historical evidence say “No.” Still, I’m happy to wait for General Petraeus’s report in mid-September.