Chechenya and Iraq

Great analysis Law Talking Guy! I didn't realize there was a connection between Ingushetia and Chechenya. Isn't Ingushetia the part of Georgia that has been undergoing a lot of unrest?

I just have two areas where I disagree with you about things.

First, in your point 3 you say "Understanding your opponent is crucial to knowing how to make peace. Willful blindness to history will damn efforts to make stability, because the motivations of groups and individual persons cannot be deduced from their relative power or outside assessments of the benefits or disadvantages of cooperation."

The average age in Iraq is 19 years old, they have no direct memory of Iraq's colonial past. In fact, they probably few if any personal memories of the Iran-Iraq war. Everything they "know" about Iraq's history they learned from their local political leaders in the last year or so. I know you have taught college freshman in the United States. How complete would you say their understanding of American History is? How dependent would you say their perception of that history is on their current political ideology? What I am trying to get at here is that while what actually happened in the past is certainly history, the political relevance of particular past events, real or imagined, depends on how/what people are taught. How people perceive their country's history depends on their socio-political position. I'm not saying that these perceptions are not important. They are vitally important because they send signals about people's policy preferences. BUT what we really care about are the preferences themselves not the current interpretation of past events. People's current view of history is a symptom of current policy preferences NOT the cause. Based on that recognition, we should advocate direct talks with the current leaders of the various Iraqi factions. If they chose to express themselves in historical terms, fine, but the important thing is that we find out what each faction wants now and what they will accept now.

Second, I strongly disagree with the idea that the Arab league should take over in Iraq. It's tempting to think that because they are fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims that they will be effective at moving Iraq towards stability. However, if one looks at how the military and police behave in most of the countries of the Arab League one sees gross abuses of human and civil rights, no tolerance for political dissent and an alarming tendency to respond to protests with live ammunition. What we need - and apparently can't provide ourselves - is troops specially trained and experienced at peace keeping and policing civilian populations without abusing them. The Arab League simply can't supply those kinds of troops. The Western Europeans (NATO) can supply those troops. The problem is that Bush has so thoroughly alienated most of the NATO countries' leaders - and all of their populations - that increased participation by NATO so long as Bush is President is out of the question. NATO recently said as much. They announced that NATO would not consider official participation in Iraq until after the US elections in November.