From a friend of mine. Point number one is particularly apt/annoying because I thought I had made that point explicitly but must have cut it while moving stuff around:

Jonah,
Couple things you could have mentioned a little more in the otherwise great piece.
1. Whatever we did in El Salvador and Nicaragua worked. This isn’t evidence of its moral probity since ends don’t justify means (if, indeed, we did anything wrong, which I’m not convinced of–the whole School of the Americas thing always seemed very unconvincing), but in the world of Realpolitik, we’ve got two reasonably friendly democracitas down there.
2. We are, in fact, sitting on the Kurds. There’s no reason we couldn’t let the peshmergas go in and root out all sorts of Sunni malefactors in Mosul, a Kurdish city that Saddam peopled with his Sunni cronies, particularly in the wake of the mess-tent bombing. Now, would there be some ugly incidents where the Kurdish guerillas took out some Sunni types perhaps not directly connected with the guerilla war? Yep.
And that’s why we’re not letting them, despite the fact that they know the city and the situation far more intimately than we ever will. Which seems like the exact OPPOSITE of what we’re being accused of…