Demagogue

Well, not quite. CBS's "Point-Counterpoint" is long gone -- as well as the comedic references to it. But on Slate.com, the Hoover Institution's Larry Diamond and Dan Senor, who was a senior adviser to Paul Bremer in Iraq, are engaged in an ongoing literary chess game -- writing, proposing, retorting, responding and conjecturing about the quagmire that is Iraq.

In his most recent post, Diamond made some compelling arguments, and his final question is definitely a zinger:

... we can't succeed in Iraq unless we sharply reduce this violence, and we can't do that unless we understand who is waging it and why.

It is a common (if not deliberate) misperception to portray the violent resistance in Iraq as all of one piece—or as largely foreign. The overwhelming majority of the roughly 10,000 detainees are Iraqi, not foreign. So are the vast majority of the insurgents who are planting roadside bombs, killing American troops ...

... For at least a year and a half now, representatives of a number of the Sunni-based insurgent groups have been signaling through intermediaries a desire to talk to the United States and a potential readiness to end the violent struggle through negotiation. While some talks have occurred, these have mainly been at a low (local, tactical) level.

The Bush administration has been halfheartedly probing possibilities and adjusting its posture but has not yet seized the initiative.

... The indigenous Iraqi resistance is not demanding immediate American withdrawal. But they want a schedule by which they can look over the horizon and see, even if three or five years hence, a time when Iraq will be free of foreign troops.

We do not need to commit to a fixed timetable in order to articulate some time frame by which we expect to be gone .... This then shifts the burden to the insurgents and their supporters to rein in the violence if they really want American troops gone. But it also puts the burden on us to renounce the pursuit of long-term military bases in Iraq.

Dan, why has the administration repeatedly skirted this issue of long-term bases? Will you address it in closing this dialogue?

What are we in Iraq for: to build democracy — which requires not only freedom but order, and thus a dramatic reduction of this violence — or to secure the long-term projection of American military power from Iraqi soil, which most Iraqis will not accept?