Right off the bat, I'm going to make an embarrassing admission–several, actually. Earlier, I quoted Clausewitz as saying

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Clausewitz also said, the best way to attack a powerful enemy is to attack the weakness in their greatest strength.
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Clausewitz did not say this. Al Ries and Jack Trout said it. "Who?" I hear you cry. Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote a book titled "Marketing Warfare" and I found a copy of this book on someone's stoop walking through Park Slope.

That's right, I read books I find off the street, or in the trash. I do it all the time, and I highly recommend it to everyone. I had just finished a philosophy minor when I found a copy of William James' <i>Pragmatism</i> in a pile of stuff left behind by a neighbor in my Downtown Brooklyn loft. That book changed my life as much as anything I'd read in college.

Ries and Trout (who signed this copy, by the way) wrote what I thought because of extensive quoting was just Clausewitz rehashed for business majors. (The type in this book is pretty big.) It was they, not Clausewitz as far as I can find, who said that.

At any rate, it's good advice. They give the example of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. Coke was the top brand in America, and had a real strength in their signature six-ounce bottles. Pepsi-Cola, the upstart, saw this as an opportunity to introduce twelve-ounce bottles for the same price. Coke had a very efficient operation fine-tuned nationwide to produce six-ounce bottles, and so Pespi gained the advantage for a while. Seeking weakness in the strengths of your opponents is good business or military sense.

It's why guerillas are better at fighting the U.S. military than a national army. Our armed forces are built around the likelihood of a war of attrition with another army. We're trying to adapt to the new realities of asymmetrical warfare, but while we've limited our casualties somewhat, we haven't been very effective at stabilizing a restive occupied zone. Can't build a country out of bullets, I always say.

So while seeking weakness in strength makes sense, how about strength in weakness?

Elephant and I were talking the other day and as we often to, we asked each other what we would do about Iraq. I said, we're looking at this all wrong. You could say this whole bothced occupation is a disaster for the U.S., but actually, we have an interesting position here.

The failures of our imagination have yielded us something that everybody wants. What do we have to bring to the table in Iraq? <b>Withdrawal</b>. The Iraqi people want it, the American people want it, the Arab street wants it. Now, whose interests are least served by withdrawal from Iraq? The Bush Administration and the al-Maliki administration (not to mention Al-Qaeda). Now, you know that when something is good for governments, bad for people and helping the terrorists, it's time to give up the ghost.

Now, Bill Kristol and the like protest: if we leave, aren't we just abandoning the Iraqi people? I'm sure there were concerned British citizens who thought the same thing about the Colonies in the waning days of the American War of Independence. It's their country, not ours. If we had figured this out in the first place, we wouldn't be in this mess for a variety of historical reasons.

There civil war will continue after we leave, whether that's now or a generation from now. Iraqis fought a war from 1980-88, 1990-91, endured military sanctions which killed 1.5 million from 1991-2002 (with no-fly zones and a Shiite rebellion), and have been at war with the U.S. since March of 2003. They have much more stomach for it than we do. We don't know anything like that kind of suffering.

So, what we have to do is use carrots instead of sticks. We should negotiate our withdrawal (giving governments legitimacy) for peace between factions. And we must back this deal with a payout equal to some portion of the funds we would have spent occupying the country for another year.

Elephant called them "peace didvidends" on his blog. His plan is a little different from mine:
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Rather than spending $140 billion in troops in iraq this year, I would like to propose a system of direct cash payments. This is an idea that both Republican Free-Market types and liberal cut-and-run types (like myself) can agree on.

As it stands, $140 bil. we spend on the war comes to $7000.00 for every Iraqi person. I suggest we pay this money directly to the citizens of Iraq through a series of monthly payments which will be called Pace Dividends. This comes to approximately $583 per person per month. Keep in mind that in Iraq's anemic economy, this ia a considerable amount of money.
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However, the payments come with strings. (I'm thinking No Province Left Behind meets Microlending). 1) In each consecutive month, the number of people in your village or clan commiting suicide bombings or other insurgent activities must drop. 2) Once you lose your money for the month, you lose it all. This creates a window for the kind of brutal reprisals which will keep the systme working. 3) The payments grow over the course of the year. They start out small — $200 in January, but grow to $800 by December. This keeps the incentive strong as trigger fingers get itchy.
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Elephant says my scheme is more cynical about diplomacy. I say, we make everybody sign this peace treaty in Dubai or somewhere which stipulates that the US will put $22 billion in an escrow account. The Iraqi parliament can only withdraw against that account for <i>emergency</i> counter insurgency spending. After one intervening election, the remains of the fund will be disbursed to every Iraqi resident (about 21 million), right before the next election. At the same time, we move combat troops out while training small mobile units to rebuild infrastructure with a military cohort to protect against insurgents–the kind of work the market for private security is telling us Iraq's government is not meeting. and forget about training troops–you need to train Iraqis to train troops. The Iraqi army is going to have to work that shit out in the field. By the way, I am fully prepared to petition the next president to keep UN observers in Iraq.

As soon as we leave, people are going to continue reprisal killings and sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing and all that. But this puts a real and accurate price on both peace and a functioning government. Let's not forget that $22 billion is quite the prize in graft, so every politician is going to want a piece of it. But the people stand to gain the ultimate prize, all for about eleven weeks' worth of occupation. Perhaps I'm compressing the timeleine a bit but I think if we wait too long people will start killing each other for a bigger piece of the pie. The median annual income of Iraq now stands at US$522.

Iraqis are going to need a whole lot of radiation treatment from all the depleted uranium we've been pumping into their cities and fields for over a generation now. A million bucks per person sounds like better justice than three Philadelphia lawyers could get Iraqi civilians from the Pentagon if they brought a suit in U.S. court, but a thousand is more realistic.

War supporters will say that we need to see this through, that we can win and we must win. Sorry, but I don't think we can win. We cannot accomplish every goal we set ourselves to. It's great aspirational advice for children, but not soldiers or states. I'd be much more comfortable with Bush trying to pacify Mars than Iraq, and I bet we could cut the fatality rate by 25% if not 30%. (Congrats, George, you talked me into it.)

Pursuing an impossible goal is neither worthwhile nor fair. I can aim to be a basketball star all I want, and spend millions pursuing that goal, but it's not going to happen. Every prediction the hawks have made about the war has turned out to be wrong (a favorite topic for this blog). Kristol wants us to shut up for six to nine months some reason. Is he tired of arguing or something? Show us why your opinion is worthwhile and maybe we could start a dialogue, neocons. You've given us nothing but the finest bullshit for going on four years now about this war.