BAGHDAD – For the past two weeks I’ve been embedded with the United States Army in Baghdad, and I find myself unable to figure out what to make of this place. Baghdad, despite the remarkable success of the surge, is as mind-bogglingly run-down and dysfunctional as ever, even compared with other Arabic countries. Iraq is a dark place. At times it feels like a doomed country that has only been temporarily spared the reckoning that is coming. Other times it is possible to look past the grimness and see progress beyond the mere slackening off of violence and war. Is Iraq truly on the mend, or has a total breakdown been merely postponed? Opinions here among Americans and Iraqis are mixed, but nearly everyone seems to agree about one thing at least: terrorists and insurgents will respond with a surge of their own in the wake of the upcoming withdrawal of American forces.

Sergeant Nick Franklin took me to meet an Iraqi woman named Malath who works with the local Sons of Iraq security organization in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad. When I asked her if she thought her area was ready to stand on its own without American help, she bluntly answered “Of course not.” She doesn’t think Iraq needs another year or two or even three. She thinks it will need decades. “We won’t be ready until young people replace the older generation in the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police. They need to replace the old Baath Party members who are still inside.”

Her view is the darkest. But Iraqis who think the job should only require a few more years are still pessimistic about what they think is likely to happen when the negotiated Status of Forces Agreement goes into effect and American troops withdraw from Iraqi cities in 2009. “We’ve seen hell,” an Iraqi intelligence source said when I met him in his house. “And that hell, if the American forces evacuate, will repeat. If Obama forces an evacuation from Iraq soon, everything will turn against him in this land.”

Many American soldiers agree. “Everyone says things will implode after we leave,” Lieutenant Eric Kuylman told me. “They’ll blame it on politics and religion, but it’s not going to be any of that. It’s going to be about straight power. It’s going to be guys trying to one-up each other. It’s going to be key people in cities just like this who will want to seize the power gaps. It’s going to break down along tribal lines and these militias that we’ve put in place. When we pull out, there will be power vacuums. There will be pockets of people that we’ve put in power. I mean, everybody already has shaky alliances as it is. So what you’re going to see is the straight seizing of power. People are going to try to put their own tags on it, but it’s just about the seizure of power. It’s not going to be Sunni or Shia, nothing like it. It’s just going to be men who want control.”

Not everyone holds such a bleak view, however. And pessimists have been losing the argument in Iraq ever since General David Petraeus radically transformed the American counterinsurgency strategy. But once American soldiers withdraw from urban areas, the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police will be on their own whether they’re ready or not.

I spoke to Captain AJ Boyes at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City. His company did more of the fighting in Sadr City back in the spring than any other, but he stresses that the Iraqi Army took and holds 75 percent of Sadr City all by itself. He isn’t nearly as gloomy about the future in this country as some of the others I spoke to. Though he considers himself a realist, he sounded to me like an optimist.

“If we take a snapshot of Iraqi politics, security, and governance right now in 2008,” he said, “and come back two generations from now and compare them side-by-side, I think we’ll see a huge difference. And will it be for better or for worse? I think it will be almost entirely better.”

I suspect he is probably right. Fifty years is a long time. By then the insurgency period of Iraq’s history will be as distant as King Faisal’s era is now. But what about the short and medium term? Everyone who makes policy decisions in Iraq should be far more concerned with what the country might look like in one year than in fifty.

“Will it get worse in one year?” I said to Captain Boyes. “That’s the big question.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “It will. Any time something new happens in a counterinsurgency, when there are new security forces, there is an immediate spike in violence because the insurgents are testing the ability of the new element. When we leave and transition all of what we do now to the Iraqi security forces, will there be a spike in activity? Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

And that’s the optimist view.

He thinks Iraq will be okay, even so. The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police are still shaky institutions at best, but they are much more competent than they were a few years ago. The Iraqi Army proved itself earlier this year, against nearly all expectations, when it took back areas under the control of Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in Basra and Sadr City with only a limited amount of help from Americans.

It’s possible, of course, that everybody is wrong. Iraq has made fools of almost everyone who has tried to predict its future. There are too many unstable and unpredictable variables. But we should still brace ourselves for disconcerting news in 2009.

“There will be a spike in violence,” Captain Boyes said. “The insurgents are going to want to test the new Iraqi security forces. How will the Iraqis operate completely independently? It should be up to the media to portray that as an expected thing.”

Last week the United States military conducted a raid inside Syria and killed Al Qaeda leader Abu Ghadiya in a shootout in the village of Sukariyeh. Syria’s government raged against the violation of its sovereignty and staged a massive anti-American protest in downtown Damascus. But, according to the Times of London, the Syrian government itself may have quietly green-lighted the raid in advance.

No one should be surprised if that turns out to be true. It makes perfect sense.

Read the rest of this COMMENTARY web exclusive here.

Israel is floating the idea of a non-aggression pact with Lebanon. It isn’t at all likely to work. The odds are minuscule that Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah will go along. But Lebanon will hold an election in a couple of months, and the offer of a non-aggression pact should play well with Lebanese voters who are uncomfortable with or hostile toward Hezbollah’s vision of perpetual war with the “Zionist entity.”

Negotiating with implacable and inflexible enemies is foolish. No sensible person suggests that the United States negotiate with Al Qaeda, for instance. Peace talks with Damascus won’t get Israelis anywhere either. Syria’s tyrant Bashar Assad needs a state of cold war with Israel to justify the oppressive policies against his country’s own citizens, and bad-faith negotiations yield him some measure of international legitimacy he doesn’t deserve.

Read the rest of this COMMENTARY web exclusive here.

Last week Azerbaijan conducted another rigged election just a few short months after several government officials said to my face that this time things would be different.

Advisors to President Ilham Aliyev insisted that observers from the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would fan out all over the country to monitor the election and even stop the process entirely if they detected fraudulent activity. All this was confirmed by the Israeli ambassador. Yet Aliyev was just “re-elected” with 89 percent of the vote in an election boycotted by the opposition.

Aliyev’s opponents say it was impossible for them to compete, which sounds about right. “The choice of candidates was skimpy,” Sabrina Tavernise wrote last week in the New York Times. “There were six, aside from Mr. Aliyev, but they were political nobodies, and few voters interviewed in Baku on Wednesday could identify any of them.” Imagine how free and fair our own presidential election would be if only Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain had name recognition.

It’s no wonder the president’s political opponents are almost completely invisible. Azerbaijan’s television stations are controlled by his government. Eight journalists were arrested for “libel” in the past year. Three are still in jail. Several citizens told me privately that they’re afraid to say anything critical of the government in public. It may make little difference if European election observers ensure ballots are processed and counted fairly in this kind of environment, but the OSCE and the U.S. State Department did see some improvement compared with the last election.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited me and seven of my colleagues – including Abe Greenwald and James Kirchick from this very magazine – to spend a week there in August. We had a chance to meet and interview some of the most powerful people in the country. Several ministry officials, advisors, and members of parliament said they sincerely want to democratize, but that they need more time. Some complained about the constant pressure from Western governments and seemed to expect me to sympathize. I did not. Western governments need to pressure them more in the future, not less.

When they said they sincerely wanted to reform the system, I wanted to believe them. Azerbaijan has enormous potential and seems more than ready enough for democracy. It is not Iraq, and it is not Syria. It has a booming economy, a vibrant and tolerant culture, a well-educated population, and a thoroughly modern outlook.

Azeris are pro-Western and would like to join NATO. They sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. They help the United States, and they could use help from us. They’re bordered to the north by Russia and to the south by Iran. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that begins in Azerbaijan and cuts across the South Caucasus to the Mediterranean is the only route from the resource-rich Caspian Sea to Europe that bypasses Russia. Azeris are feeling more pressure than ever now that Russian troops have dug into carved-up Georgia next door. I wish the country well, and I think you should, too.

Azerbaijan’s leaders could be a whole lot worse than they are. They aren’t tyrants; they’re autocratic technocrats. They seem to be able to balance their own appetite for power with a genuine concern for the well-being of their country. Overall, they’ve done a pretty good job since they bolted from the Soviet Union in 1991. I’ve only visited once myself, but those I know who can compare Azerbaijan today with Azerbaijan even a few years ago say the progress is so extraordinary they hardly recognize the place. Aliyev could easily win a real election on his record simply by asking average citizens if they are better or worse off today than they were eight years ago. But that’s not what happened. His government rigged it again.

“We want to be part of the Euro-Atlantic community,” said former Ambassador to the United States Hafiz Pashayev.

I think that’s terrific, and that may be where they end up. Azerbaijan is an Eastern country, but the northern portion is actually inside Europe. Many Western cultural values were imported through Russia after Moscow acquired it from the Persian Empire in 1828. I’d be happy to see Azerbaijan become an integrated member of the Euro-Atlantic community whether or not NATO membership is in the cards. But that is never going to happen if its leaders don’t scrap the autocratic system of government inherited from the Persian, Russian, and Soviet empires. The Azeris may not want to hear it, but they need to because it’s true.

Senator Barack Obama hopes to be the first American president to engage in diplomatic negotiations with the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. He even says he’s willing to meet with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Surely he must understand that what he’s proposing is a radical departure from foreign policy as practiced by both parties. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t meet with Adolf Hitler or Emperor Hirohito, Harry Truman didn’t meet with Kim Il Sung, Ronald Reagan didn’t meet with any Soviet leader until after glasnost and perestroika were in place, Bill Clinton didn’t meet with Saddam Hussein or Iran’s Mohammad Khatami and Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and no American president met with Fidel Castro.

Read the rest of this COMMENTARY web exclusive here.

In Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” [Emphasis added.]

What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.

Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.

Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?

The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.

I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.

Like many who watched the debate, I was bracing myself for Palin to say something off-putting about foreign policy. She’s the one who needed the crash course, allegedly; Biden is supposedly Mr. Foreign Policy. He’s supposed to be the experienced elder statesman Senator Barack Obama chose to help him govern and fill in some of his knowledge and experience gaps. He’s supposed to know far more about foreign policy than she does.

I wasn’t exactly encouraged by Palin’s answer to one of Katie Couric’s foreign policy questions: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome?” Couric used Hamas’ victory in the West Bank and Gaza as an example. Palin either dodged the question or did not understand it.

Biden, though, against all expectations and odds, managed to say something far more bizarre and off-planet than anything Palin has said on the topic to date.

Senator Barack Obama said something at the presidential debate last week that almost perfectly encapsulates the difference between his foreign policy and his opponent’s: “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself acknowledges the war on terrorism started in Afghanistan and it needs to end there.” I don’t know if Obama paraphrased Gates correctly, but if so, they’re both wrong.

If Afghanistan were miraculously transformed into the Switzerland of Central Asia, every last one of the Middle East’s rogues gallery of terrorist groups would still exist. The ideology that spawned them would endure. Their grievances, such as they are, would not be salved. The political culture that produced them, and continues to produce more just like them, would hardly be scathed. Al Qaedism is the most radical wing of an extreme movement which was born in the Middle East and exists now in many parts of the world. Afghanistan is not the root or the source.

Naturally the war against them began in Afghanistan. Plans for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were hatched in Afghanistan. But the temporary location of the plotters of that strike means little in the wide view of a long struggle. Osama bin Laden and his leadership just as easily could have planned the attacks from Saudi Arabia before they were exiled, or from their refuge in Sudan in the mid 1990s. Theoretically they could have even planned the attacks from an off-the-radar “safe house” in a place like France or even Nebraska had they managed to sneak themselves in. The physical location of the planning headquarters wasn’t irrelevant, but in the long run the ideology that motivates them is what must be defeated. Perhaps the point would be more obvious if the attacks were in fact planned in a place like France instead of a failed state like Afghanistan.

Hardly anyone wants to think about the monumental size of this task or how long it will take. The illusion that the United States just needs to win in Afghanistan and everything will be fine is comforting, to be sure, but it is an illusion. Winning the war in Iraq won’t be enough either, nor will permanently preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. The war may end somewhere with American troops on the ground, or, like the Cold War, it might not. No one can possibly foresee what event will actually put a stop to this war in the end. It is distant and unknowable. The world will change before we can even imagine what the final chapter might look like. Read the rest of this entry »

Senator Barack Obama’s answer to Katie Couric’s question a few days ago about why he thinks there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since September 11, 2001, was bizarre.

“Well,” he said, “I think that the initial invasion into Afghanistan disrupted al Qaeda. And that was the right thing to do. I mean, we had to knock out those safe havens. And that, I think, weakened them. We did some work in strengthening our homeland security apparatus here. Obviously, the average person knows that when they go to the airport, because they are goin’ through taking off their shoes … all that. The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself.” [Emphasis added.]

Jennifer Rubin correctly noted that Couric asked Obama why the U.S. has not been attacked, but let’s leave that aside. The notion that “we gave Al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself” is breathtakingly ahistorical.

The U.S. and NATO have never let up in Afghanistan. At no time were American resources redeployed from Afghanistan to Iraq. (CORRECTION: The number of troops were not reduced in Afghanistan thanks to the war in Iraq, but some CIA agents and predator drones were redeployed.)

Obama could, perhaps, argue that fewer resources were available for the fight in Afghanistan because of the war in Iraq. That would be true. But that’s also true of Al Qaeda’s resources. They also deployed manpower and material to Iraq that otherwise could have been sent to Afghanistan.

The Al Qaeda leadership emphatically has not agreed with Obama that Iraq is a distraction. It has been their main event for years.

“The most important and serious issue today for the whole world,” Osama bin Laden said on December 28, 2004, “is this Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation. It is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world’s millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate.”

It’s only natural that an Arab-led and mostly Arab-staffed terrorist group like Al Qaeda would be more concerned with a strategically critical country in the heart of the Arab Middle East than with a primitive non-Arab backwater in Central Asia.

Bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri explicitly spelled out Al Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq on July 9, 2005. “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq,” he said. “The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq.”

The war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq can plausibly be described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda. But the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot possibly be accurately described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda.

And make no mistake: Al Qaeda’s manpower and resources have been thoroughly degraded from its disastrous fight with Americans and Iraqis, especially in Anbar Province which was briefly established as Al Qaeda’s “capital” of the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq.”

Last summer I met with U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province and also what until 2007 was Al Qaeda’s key stronghold.

“What’s the most important thing Americans need to know about Iraq that they don’t currently know?” I asked him.

“That we’re fighting Al Qaeda,” he said without hesitation. “[Abu Musab al] Zarqawi invented Al Qaeda in Iraq. The top leadership outside Iraq squawked and thought it was a bad idea. Then he blew up the Samarra mosque, triggered a civil war, and got the whole world’s attention. Then the Al Qaeda leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province. They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost.”

Al Qaeda lost in Iraq partly because American soldiers and Marines outsmarted and outfought them, but also, just as importantly, because the Iraqi people themselves rose up in resistance.

Iraqis aren’t the only ones who have soured on Al Qaeda lately.

Last year the Pew Research Center surveyed Muslims in 16 different countries. Support for suicide bombers has declined in nearly every country that was also surveyed in 2002, and the decline is dramatic almost everywhere. The only Muslim communities surveyed where support for suicide bombers remains at greater than 50 percent are, unsurprisingly, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The United States could not have prudently allowed itself to yield the field to Al Qaeda in either Iraq or Afghanistan by being wholly distracted from one or the other. Both fronts were crucial for Al Qaeda, which means both were crucial for the United States. It doesn’t matter if we like the fact that we have been embroiled in a hot war with Al Qaeda in two countries at once. That’s just how it is.

If Al Qaeda hadn’t poured all those resources into Iraq, they likely would have poured them into Afghanistan. And the U.S. very well may have lost the war by this time. Afghanistan, at the very least, would be in much worse shape than it is. And it’s not looking good even now. Independent foreign correspondent Michael Yon, who is hardly known as a pessimistic defeatist, still insists we’re losing the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has all but won the war in Iraq even though Iraq was in much worse shape recently and the war there did not last as long. Iraq, as it turned out, was an easier place to fight Al Qaeda and other sundry insurgent and terrorist groups than Afghanistan.

Obama is rightly worried about the safe havens Al Qaeda has created in Pakistan, and it’s to his credit that he refuses to let up about it. But for years he’s been entirely blasé about the safe havens Al Qaeda created in Iraq–in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baqubah, Mosul, and parts of Baghdad. For years he has aggressively promoted a policy of abandoning the fight in that country which quite obviously would have allowed Al Qaeda to preserve those safe havens and possibly even expand them.

He finally admitted the surge worked after wallowing in denial about it for a year and a half while those of us who actually worked in Iraq knew he was wrong. It’s time for him to admit that one of the results of the surge is that Al Qaeda lost its war in Iraq and was not given time to reconstitute.

Russia has a problem. Moscow’s recognition of Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia a few weeks ago has already encouraged some of its own disgruntled minorities to push harder for independence from the Russian Federation. Russia’s semi-autonomous republics of Ingushetia and Tatarstan have both ratcheted up their demands to secede.

Radical Islamists in Ingushetia, just across the Caucasus mountains from Georgia, have waged a low-level insurgency against the Russian government for some time now, though it has yet to reach the level of violent anti-Russian ferocity waged earlier by their cousins in neighboring Chechnya. A new group calling itself the People’s Parliament of Ingushetia has just surfaced after Russia’s adventure in Georgia with the stated aim of secession. More moderate opposition leaders also recently joined the cause of the radicals. Rebellious Ingush are not only emboldened by Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, they’re enraged by the assassination a few weeks ago of prominent anti-Kremlin journalist Magomed Yevloyev.

Meanwhile, an umbrella organization of various nationalist groups known as the All-Tatar Civic Center in Tatarstan, announced that they likewise want out. They also cite the Abkhazia and South Ossetia precedents. “Russia has lost the moral right not to recognize us,” said Rashit Akhmetov, editor of the Zvezda Povolzhya newspaper in Tatarstan’s capital.

The odds that Tatarstan will actually become a successful independent country at any time are remote. A large minority of its people, around 40 percent, are ethnic Russians. A serious secessionist movement in that part of Russia could get ugly, and fast. If the republic ever were to become independent, it would be surrounded by Russia and could easily be strangled by Moscow. It’s a long shot at best for these people, but that doesn’t mean Tatarstan can’t become a serious problem for Russia in the medium term, especially if other constituent parts of the federation resist at the same time. Tatarstan and Ingushetia are only two republics of many that could undermine Moscow from the inside.

Former President Vladimir Putin cynically used Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia earlier this year as an excuse for Russia’s invasion and dismemberment of Georgia, but the Tatars and Ingush are more plausibly citing Russia’s very own precedents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Kosovo and Serbia are far from Ingushetia and even farther from Tatarstan. What happens in the Balkans seems to stay in the Balkans, as far as they are concerned. What happens in Russia, though, can hardly be considered remote for disaffected minorities in subjugated republics that remain inside Russia’s own borders.

The Soviet Union was really an empire squared. Moscow lost pieces of its outer empire in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus, but many more pieces of the rump empire, or federation, might yet break off or at least severely bleed Russia internally. Chechnya has already famously done so, and the possibility of neighboring Ingushetia likewise exploding has been apparent even to casual observers. And a majority in Tatarstan actually voted to secede as far back as 1992.

Vladimir Putin and current President Dmitri Medvedev should have seen this coming when they changed the rules governing borders in the former Soviet Union. The message from the Ingush and Tatars to Moscow couldn’t be simpler: If they get to secede from Georgia, we get to secede from Russia. Your move.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin darkly hinted that his country would invade and dismember Georgia months before last month’s war in the South Caucasus region began. “We have Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Pridnestrovie [Transnistria],” he said back in February of this year after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, “and they say Kosovo is a special case?” Putin has a point, but only a very small one. The overwhelming majority of Kosovars want nothing more to do with Serbia just as the majorities in Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia want to secede. But there the similarities end.

Kosovo is a viable nation state of more than two million people, greater in size than its neighbors Montenegro and Macedonia which also broke free of Yugoslavia recently. (Montenegro’s secession from the Yugoslavian rump state of Serbia-Montenegro in 2006 somehow didn’t produce any hand-wringing about a “Montenegro precedent” in Russia or anywhere else.)

South Ossetia, meanwhile, has a population of around 60,000 people, the size of a small American suburb. Abkhazia’s population is less than 200,000, around the size of a large American suburb. These are not viable nation states.

Nevertheless, last week Russia recognized them as independent. Unlike Kosovo – which is formally recognized by 46 counties, including all of the G7 – no country in the world other than Russia recognizes the “independence” of Abkhazia or South Ossetia. That’s partly because what really just happened is de facto Russian annexation. Before the invasion and dismemberment of Georgia, Russia made the majority in South Ossetia and Abkhazia citizens of Russia and gave passports to anybody who asked. I just returned from a trip to Georgia, and the Russian military wouldn’t let me enter South Ossetia or even the central Georgian city of Gori because I did not have a Russian visa.

Nobody annexed Kosovo. In theory Kosovo may have been suited for annexation by Albania since around 90 percent of Kosovars are ethnic Albanians. But few Kosovars want to be part of Albania. Albania remains a dysfunctional post-communist mess of a place, though one that at least is less corrupt, authoritarian, and dysfunctional than Russia.

The biggest difference, though, is how South Ossetia and, especially, Abkhazia managed to forge themselves as autonomous regions of Georgia in the first place.

In 1989, only 17 percent of what is now Abkhazia was ethnically Abkhaz. Almost half its population were ethnic Georgians. The remaining population was made up mostly of Russians, Armenians, and Greeks. After a brutal war of ethnic-cleansing in 1992 and 1993, most of the Georgians were killed or driven out. More than 200,000 remain internally displaced persons inside their own country. Most of the Russians, most of the Greeks, and almost half the Armenians have also since left. An Abkhazian majority that wants to secede from Georgia wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for that war and the mass reduction of ethnic Georgians who lived there.

South Ossetia is more ambiguous. Unlike Abkhazia, that district did begin in the post-Soviet era with an ethnic Ossetian majority, but ethnic Georgians made up nearly a third of its population until most were driven out by Russia’s invasion last month.

Kosovo was not created by ethnic cleansing. Ethnic Albanians did not need to drive out Serbs in order to create a space where they were a majority with the plausible ability to secede. They made up the overwhelming majority before a single shot was fired in the 1999 war, just as they make up the overwhelming majority now.

Kosovo’s Albanians, however, were the victims of a massive ethnic-cleansing campaign by Serbian Nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose forces displaced 90 percent of the population and drove almost 50 percent out of the country entirely. That is what Kosovo has in common with Abkhazia. Kosovo would still be empty of Albanians if NATO hadn’t escorted them back to their homes in 1999.

Kosovo wasn’t created by ethnic cleansing. Abkhazia was. If anyone in the Caucasus has something meaningful in common with the Albanians of Kosovo, it’s the Georgians who lived in Abkhazia.

The real parallel with Abkhazia is Bosnia’s Republica Srpska, the ethnic-Serb dominated region carved out of Bosnia by the recently captured war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Republica Srpska wouldn’t exist with an ethnic Serb majority if it weren’t first violently purged of Croats and Bosniaks in the mid 1990s.

Kosovo, to be sure, has something in common with Abkhazia. But the surface-level similarity exists far more for the convenience of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Ministry of Disinformation than it does on closer inspection in the real world. The Kosovo precedent, framed more appropriately, is a warning to tyrants and mass murderers that they may permanently lose territory they attempt to ethnically cleanse. Russia’s Abkhazia precedent, on the other hand, encourages ethnic-cleansing by rewarding its victors with international recognition of territory they violently carve out for themselves.

South Ossetia has a bit more in common with Kosovo. Though ethnic-cleansing has taken place there on a smaller scale, at least that district had an Ossetian majority to start out with. But its microscopic population of 60,000 makes the analogy a little ridiculous. If every disgruntled minority group of that size in the world justifies a massive foreign invasion and de-facto annexation, watch out. Few borders on Earth are so perfectly drawn along ethnic lines. Russia’s own are certainly not.

There are sensible reasons to be concerned about the Kosovo precedent, but the Abkhazia and South Ossetia precedents are far more dangerous to peace and stability in the world.

As recently as the first half of 2007, the idea of an American victory in Iraq seemed like a fantasy to just about everyone, including me. General David Petraeus surged additional troops to Iraq, however, and he transformed the joint American-Iraqi counterinsurgency strategy into what nearly all observers now acknowledge is a remarkable and unexpected success. Few bother to argue otherwise anymore. What remains ambiguous and contested is the definition of an American victory.

It’s slightly tricky for a couple of reasons. Pinpointing the exact date when a counterinsurgency ends – not just in Iraq, but any counterinsurgency – is impossible. There are no final battles. There can’t be. And if we don’t know when the war is over, it can be difficult to figure out what over even means in the first place. So how will we know if we’ve won?

Part of the problem here is that the war in Iraq is usually thought of as a single war in Iraq. But there have been at least three wars in Iraq since 2003 – the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party regime, the civil war between Sunni and Shia militias, and the insurgencies against government and international forces waged by a constellation of guerrilla and terrorist groups. All three wars are distinct from each other, and two of the three are already over.

The war against Saddam Hussein and his government ended when the regime was overthrown and what remained of its army was disbanded. You might say it didn’t officially end until he was captured in December of 2003, but he effectively lost when he was demoted from absolute dictator to fugitive. No matter what else might happen, Saddam Hussein will never be considered victorious.

The civil war between Sunni and Shia militias likewise is over. We know that now because we can look back in hindsight. Not one single person was killed in ethno-sectarian conflict in May or June of this year. That particular conflict had been winding down since December of 2006 when the monthly casualties began freefalling in an almost straight line from a high of more than 2,000 a month down to nothing. Nobody won that war. It’s just over.

Casualties from insurgent warfare haven’t slacked off as completely, but they have almost slacked off as completely. If all violent trends continue in their current downward directions, this war, too, will taper off to non-existence or relative insignificance. We’ll know in hindsight, too, when that war finally is over after no has been killed by insurgents for a few months.

What looks now like the last dying gasp of the various anti-Iraqi insurgencies is all that remains of these various wars in Iraq. If attacks against the Iraqi government and multinational forces drop off to zero or near zero, it ought to go without saying that the insurgent groups will have lost and the counterinsurgents will have won.

Whether these wars were worth fighting or not may be debated forever. Determining the winners and losers, though, is short and obvious work as long as the three conflicts are properly understood to be separate.

The “March 14″ movement is a political vehicle for Lebanon’s liberals, democrats, free-market capitalists, human rights activists, and those who want an exit from the seemingly endless war with the “Zionist entity.” Unfortunately, that is not all it is. It’s also a political vehicle for hard-line Sunni Arab Nationalists and other political retrogrades who only oppose Hezbollah and the Syrian Baath regime because they hate Shias and Alawites as much as they hate Jews.

My colleague Noah Pollak is rightly horrified by the death worship on display in Beirut this week after Israel released the child-murdering terrorist ghoul Samir Kuntar to Hezbollah in exchange for the dead bodies of two kidnapped soldiers. “Lebanon’s March 14th movement cast itself into an abyss of moral depravity that the bloc’s supporters — myself included — never thought possible,” he wrote. I’m sorry to say this–I’m a March 14 supporter, too–but I’m a bit less surprised, if not less repulsed, by this recent turn of events.

Read the rest of this COMMENTARY web exclusive here.

Independent reporter Michael Yon has spent more time in Iraq embedded with combat soldiers than any other journalist in the world, and a few days ago he boldly declared the war over:

Barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

I’m reluctant to say “the war has ended,” as he did, but everything else he wrote is undoubtedly true. The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. That is a mathematical fact.

If you doubt it, look at the data.

Read the rest of the COMMENTARY web exclusive here.

Hezbollah is alarming its Lebanese opponents by expanding its territory through the purchase of property outside Shia areas in Lebanon. Former civil war-era President Amin Gemayel went on television Thursday and said what many Lebanese have feared for months now while this has unfolded.

“There is some sort of military preparation starting from Niha in Jezzine all the way across the entire Western mountain range with military surveillance posts set up from Jezzine to Sannine all the way up to Laqlouq,” he said.

If he weren’t talking about an army that really does build massive and sophisticated military infrastructure – including deep tunnels and a high-tech surveillance system in Beirut’s international airport, of all places – I might suspect he was paranoid or exaggerating.

Amin’s Phalange Party is a vehicle for mostly parochial and sectarian Christians, and it has a dark past, as do most parties in Lebanon. His concerns, however, are echoed at the more broad-based and mainstream online magazine NOW Lebanon. “These are preparations for war,” says an editorial earlier this week, “or rather preparations to ensure that if there is a war, Hezbollah’s adversaries won’t be able to fight one. The party knows better than to enter Christian, Druze or Sunni areas. So it has opted for control of the high ground – high ground overlooking the territories of its foes but also controlling lines of communication between mainly Shia areas in the northern Bekaa Valley, the southern Bekaa, South Lebanon, and Beirut’s southern suburbs . . . [W]hat is taking place today has so transgressed the red lines of all communities that what we will almost certainly see in the near future is a dangerous logic of communal self-defense taking over.”

Even if these moves by Hezbollah are being misinterpreted by the overly anxious, NOW Lebanon is correct to point out the danger for the simple reason that they are perceived as threatening. Everyone in Lebanon knows all too well why the “logic of communal self-defense” is an ominous development.

Communal self-defense means sectarian self-defense, and sectarian self-defense means exactly the same thing in Lebanon that it means in Iraq: militias. If the police and the army cannot or will not disarm Hezbollah – and they cannot and will not – then the only self-defense options remaining are personal and communal. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that an armed society is a polite society, but he didn’t know the Middle East very well.

Critics of Lebanon’s Future Movement, the relatively liberal and overwhelmingly dominant Sunni party led by Saad Hariri and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, love to suggest that Hariri has his own militia, as if that draws some sort of moral equivalence between him and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah who heads up the private army of a hostile state. The truth is that Hariri’s “militia” consists of little more than a bumbling personal security detail from a company called Secure Plus.

Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, on the other hand, really does have a militia of sorts – at least one that can be called up when needed – and it successfully repelled an attempted invasion of the Chouf Mountains by Hezbollah last month. I’d be quite frankly shocked if the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces party didn’t have at least a small remnant of their old militia.

In any case, Christians, Sunnis, and Druze have been talking about building up their own private forces for some time now to provide a balance of power in Lebanon because the state is too weak to handle the job. Since Jumblatt proved he can repel Hezbollah with a militia, and Hariri cannot because he doesn’t have a militia, the incentive for communal re-armament is now greater than it has been since the civil war ended. NOW Lebanon says Hezbollah’s current strategy is suicidal, and it is. But it’s the most destructive form of suicide possible, the political equivalent of a suicide bombing.

I have written many times that Hezbollah’s enemies cannot defeat them in battle. It’s still true. What’s also true is that Hezbollah cannot defeat everyone else. A renewed civil war would produce a grinding stalemate with Hezbollah as the strongest and with the highest body count. Nasrallah would lose nearly every advantage he has as the leader of the only seriously armed faction, and the rest of the country would circle the drain along with him.

Call it the Iraqification of Lebanon, which is ironic since the civil war and insurgency in Iraq could just as easily have been described as Lebanonization. It may be farce when history repeats itself, but it’s still tragic.