I'm interested to ask the question: Why is it, and how is it, that we've evolved away from mass armies to this period of sporadic but extremely violent behavior that creates the potential for nation-to-nation conflict, but ultimately gives us group-against-nation conflict-groups like Al-Qaeda, but also other like-minded folks around the world? First, consider the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing. That was a terrorist attack by a group against a nation. If you move from that to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia; and from there to the bombing of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 where hundreds of people were killed; and if you move from that to the bombing of the uss Cole in Yemen in 2000; and then you move forward to 2001 with 9/11; one can see that these are all group-against-nation conflicts and they raise the questions: What caused that? Was that a natural evolution that was brought about by military strength? Or the lack of military strength? Or was that a condition brought about by-what I would describe as-poor politics?

Here's my thesis: I believe that over the course of two decades America indicated to the world and terrorist groups that we will take no national action when we are attacked in this country. Over those twenty years the terrorists became emboldened. They began to think big and they came up with 9/11, and we see the results of that. Does that mean that I blame specific people, specifically the previous presidents of the United States, Bill Clinton and so forth, for having done something wrong over the previous two decades? No, it does not. Rather, I blame the electorate in this country. I blame myself and those just like me. You know, we live in a blessed nation where at any point in time we have precisely the government we deserve. America became more interested in the baseball tickets, the new automobile and the accumulation of wealth, and less interested in the signals that were passed over the last couple decades about this thing that we now identify everyday in our media as terror.

I don't know what the future holds, but I'm pretty sure of what we're looking at now.

General Tommy Franks served as commander-in-chief, United States Central Command, during which he led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. He is author of American Soldier (2004).

Defining Victory and Defeat in Iraq

Stephen Biddle
What would victory in Iraq look like?

Many now believe that victory means a friendly, prosperous, self-defending democracy, while defeat means civil war-and the metrics that matter most are thus measures of elections held, Iraqi security forces trained, electricity generated, etc. Such a victory creates a demonstration effect in which Iraqi democracy catalyzes political change elsewhere in the region, removing the underlying cause of Islamist terrorism; a defeat, by this logic, would produce region-wide chaos that would undermine, not facilitate, the larger War on Terror.

Yet this whole analysis is deeply flawed. Iraq may or may not become a stable democracy someday-but the demonstration effect is already lost. Complete success is thus unlikely. But total failure can still be averted.

The challenge here is not to avert civil war, however. Iraq is already in a civil war-and has been for a long time. It is too late for prevention. The real challenge now is termination.

This means we need to shift from a strategy designed for classical counter-insurgency to one designed for terminating an ongoing civil war.

The two are very different. The standard playbook for classical counter-insurgency is to win hearts and minds with political and economic reform while building up the indigenous government's military and handing the fighting off to them as quickly as possible. This makes sense if the enemy is an ideological, nationalist or class-based insurgency waging a violent competition for good governance with an existing regime. Vietnam was such a struggle; Malaya was another.

But Iraq is not. The underlying conflict in Iraq is not between competing ideas of legitimate government; it is between ethnic and sectarian subgroups fighting for self-interest and group survival.

In this kind of war, classical counter-insurgency strategy makes things worse, not better. In particular, the effort to hand over security to an indigenous army just throws gasoline on the fire. In a civil war there is no "national" military that all can regard as a plausible defender of their interests: the subgroup that controls the government controls the state military, but to their rival's population they are the enemy-the problem, not the solution. For Iraqi Sunnis, the "national" security forces look like a Shi‘a-Kurdish militia with better weapons. The stronger the United States makes this force, the harder the Sunnis fight back in a struggle all sides see as existential.

By contrast, the standard approach for terminating a communal civil war is to negotiate a power-sharing deal, then to enforce this deal with neutral peacekeepers drawn from outside. The state military cannot serve this purpose, certainly not alone. The whole problem in communal civil war is that the parties do not trust one another; a large, unchecked indigenous army will look to the minority like a threat to their survival. A power-sharing deal is just a scrap of paper if the real power-the military-could fall under the sway of communal rivals. Hence the need for outsiders: Without a reasonably neutral force to police a deal, no deal can be stable and the prospects for settlement are slim.

In a better world, some multinational institution would broker the deal and provide the peacekeepers. This is not going to happen in Iraq. So if the civil war termination script is going to be followed here, the United States is going to have to do the heavy lifting itself.

Current U.S. policy, however, undermines our prospects for this in at least two ways. First, we have little leverage for compelling the mutual compromises needed for real power sharing. Each camp sees potentially genocidal stakes in power sharing: the downside risks if the deal fails to ensure their security could be mass violence at the hands of communal rivals. Against such enormous stakes, major leverage will be needed to convince nervous parties to accept the risks; U.S. offers of development aid or trade assistance or political recognition are trivial by comparison. And this thin gruel is getting thinner as the United States begins to cut even the modest aid we now provide-the Marshall Plan this is not. Such weak leverage will never persuade Iraqis to take the huge risks involved in real compromise.

Second, we are apparently unwilling to play the role of long-term peacekeeping stabilizer. Though disliked by many Iraqis, in principle U.S. forces could still do this. In recent months American efforts in suppressing Shi‘a militias and our comparative sectarian evenhandedness in places such as Tal Afar and Baghdad are persuading Sunnis that we are potential defenders against Shi‘a violence. Though Shi‘a are wary of American motives, three years of U.S. combat against Sunni guerillas give us the bona fides to keep Shi‘a trust if we play our cards right. We can be neutral-the problem is that we are not willing to stay. Who would trust a deal enforced by a peacekeeper who announces its intention to leave as soon as it can hand its job over to one of the combatants in an ongoing civil war?

Theoretically, at least, the second problem could be solved if we could create a truly national, rather than sectarian, institution in the Iraqi security forces to replace us-a force with true intercommunal balance; with soldiers and officers who see themselves as Iraqis and not as Shi‘a, Kurds or Sunnis; that fights any rebel or protects any population regardless of sect or ethnicity; and with the competence and motivation to defeat those rebels in battle. There are a host of practical barriers to accomplishing this in objective reality, ranging from the increasing salience of subnational identity among all Iraqis since 2003, to the reticence of many Iraqi recruits to fight outside their home provinces (in practical terms, a reluctance to do something other than defend their subgroup from outsiders), to the challenge of motivating soldiers to give their lives for a government many see as corrupt or incompetent, to the difficulties of establishing modern systems of pay, leave, resupply and administration in a society which has seen little efficient public administration in the past, to many other challenges large and small.

But a more fundamental problem is perceptual. Even if the Iraqi military were, in reality, a competent, evenhanded, nonsectarian force, Sunnis do not see it that way. All polls show radical differences in trust for the national security forces across communal groups, and the Sunnis clearly do not trust the state's instruments. This should be no surprise: Overcoming this inevitable lack of trust in an ongoing civil war is extremely difficult. This is why the civil war termination literature puts such stress on outside peacekeepers. To build trust across such divides is hard enough in a postwar peace policed by others; to believe Iraqis can do this themselves in the midst of the fighting after the only quasi-neutral force-ours-has departed would require tremendous optimism.