One thing I was struck by listening to Allawi last week was how often he referred to “tribes,” the tribes of Fallujah, the tribes of Najaf, etc, etc. It made me realize how little any of us “generalists” sitting here in the US really understand of what’s going on in Iraq. What do we know about how a tribal society operates? That doesn’t mean things are necessarily going better than we think, or worse, or that we shouldn’t comment on what we read. But we should have a little humility. I suspect Allawi has a pretty sophisticated, or at least very Iraqi, approach to re-establishing security in the restive cities. The American approach, based on our traditional mode of warfare, would be to engage the enemy quickly and destroy him. The Allawi approach is dependent on equal parts negotiation, military pressure, and bribery (i.e., reconstruction aid). All of these tactics are then mixed up, as we saw in Najaf, in a dizzying back-and-forth that is very frustrating to watch. But I’m told that Allawi considers Najaf a success, that he will try to duplicate its model elsewhere, and something could happen in Fallajuh faster than we expect. For what it’s worth…