Bill Whittle’s latest essay reminds me of this post that I wrote a couple years ago on the pacification of Iraq:

One of the interesting things about [Tit for Tat] is that the more similar algorithms it has to deal with, the better it does. Put in an environment of non-cooperators, it has a much harder time, but it can still be more successful than them, and if it has a few others to cooperate with, it can survive even in a sea of non-cooperators.

Non-cooperators, on the other hand, don’t do well in a cooperative society. A non-nice strategy (one that always, or occasionally, or randomly defects unprovoked) won’t do well in a world of TFTs, because after the first time they get screwed by it, they will not cooperate with it again, at least until it changes its ways. So while it gets a big payoff the first time, it gets a much smaller one in subsequent exchanges, whereas the TFTs interacting with each other always get the medium benefit.

Thus, it’s possible for a small group of cooperators to “colonize” a larger group of non-cooperators, and eventually take it over, whereas a group of non-cooperators invading a larger group of cooperators will not thrive, and will eventually die out. This is the basis for Axelrod’s (and others’) claim that there is evolutionary pressure for cooperation to evolve.

This may hold the key to fixing Iraq, and ultimately the Middle East. While there’s a lot of bad news coming from that country right now, the fact remains that much of it is calm and at peace–that part doesn’t make the news. It may be that nationwide elections won’t be possible in January, but certainly it should be for some regions (particularly the Kurdish region).

In fact, there were national elections in January. But this provides a possible key to a metric of success. Instead of counting suicide bombings and violence levels (which the terrorists can maintain at an almost arbitrary level as long as there are a few of them around, due to entropy), as the media does (because if it bleeds it leads), it would be more useful to measure how small an area they appear in, and how large a one is relatively peaceful, as Anbar now seems to be, based on Michael Yon’s reports of boredom there.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hmmmm…just one more thought. Is the Anglosphere a “tit for tat” culture and legal system? I wonder if it’s ever been discussed over here?

It’s not just Joe Lieberman any more. Bob Kerrey:

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq’s middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically “yes.”

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified–though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.

My only dispute with that it that I remain unconvinced that bin Laden is still alive. But his movement certainly lives on, and it would remain a victory for it.

A depressing story about the fecklessness of the State Department and North Korea’s (shocking!) perfidy.

A depressing story about the fecklessness of the State Department and North Korea’s (shocking!) perfidy.

A depressing story about the fecklessness of the State Department and North Korea’s (shocking!) perfidy.

…from Baghdad:

Still living in Baghdad, this family has not fled the community it lives in. Shia and Sunni live on both sides of the home.

Some people forget that the sectarian violence kicked off in 2005 as part a deliberate strategy by AQIZ. Too many people assume that Sunni and Shia in Iraq have been killing each other for centuries.

The war in Iraq is plagued by a Congress who lacks the information to cast a vote and a public who lacks the basic knowledge to take part in an opinion poll.

…Is there hope for Baghdad? Yes. The additional U.S. forces from the surge are already showing limited signs of success. They are not the signs quantified by London or D.C. think tanks.

Every Battalion Commander I talked with gave me the same metrics to measure success–Commerce, people returning to their homes, essential services, kids playing soccer in fields they haven’t played on in 2 years, professionalization of the police and security services.

Those are things that do not fit well in an index and things a person can only see on the ground by going back to the same areas of operation every few months.

Which is why I will be back in Dora and West Rasheed in a few months.

…but losing the war in Information Space. And the media is, wittingly or otherwise, not on our side.

As long as al-Qaeda detonated IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, they could increase the perception of a quagmire. By getting the media to focus on the IEDs-of-the-day, al Qaeda was able to bury the good news (like the training of the Iraqi Army and reconstruction efforts), and was able to weather the loss of senior leaders like Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

In the case of keeping Cornet Wales from deploying with his unit, it did not take any IEDs. He was kept home via the use of threats by a terrorist whose claims were repeated by the media. Eventually, senior British Army officers flinched. This is a major victory for the terrorists in Iraq

Norman Podhoretz makes it.

And no, before you ask, I don’t know whether he does it well or not. I haven’t had time to read it yet. I link as a favor to my readers who may wish to. But it’s generally worth reading Podhoretz, one of the original and self-admitted “neocons,” if just to provoke thought and discussion. And I will say that I agree at least with the first two paragraphs.

[Update in the late afternoon]

Bernard Lewis, who is cited by Podhoretz in his piece, has further thoughts in the WSJ today (Ron Paul should read it):

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: “What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?”

…From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that…dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks–on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000–all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two–to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences–both for Islam and for America–will be deep, wide and lasting.

A comment from Instapundit, with regard to Max Boot’s WSJ column (following up on his previous article):

The commanders’ timetables are driven by a desire to win. The Washington politicians’ timetables are driven by a cowardly desire to have the war off the table before the 2008 elections.

Yes.

The key message from the Boot column:

It’s still possible to stave off catastrophic defeat in Iraq. But the only way to do it is to give Gen. Petraeus and his troops more time–at least another year–to try to change the dynamics on the ground. The surge strategy may be a long shot but every alternative is even worse.

Kind of like democracy.

Max Boot has one (while also cautioning patience). One of the things that I don’t understand why the administration isn’t doing:

Another necessity is to go more aggressively after foreign fighters. They comprise a relatively small percentage of the overall insurgency, but they account for a very high percentage of the most grotesque attacks–80 to 90 percent of all suicide bombings, according to General Petraeus’s briefing with Pentagon reporters on April 26. These jihadists are of many nationalities, but most infiltrate from Syria. The Bush administration has repeatedly vowed that Syria would suffer unspecified consequences if it did not cut off this terrorist pipeline, but so far this has been an empty threat. The administration has refused to authorize Special Operations forces to hit terrorist safe houses and “rat lines” on the Syrian side of the border, even though international law recognizes the right of “hot pursuit” and holds states liable for letting their territory be used to stage attacks on neighbors. It’s high time to unleash our covert operators–Delta Force, the SEALs, and other units in the Joint Special Operations Command–to take the fight to the enemy. They can stage low-profile raids with great precision, and Syrian president Bashar Assad would have scant ability to retaliate. We also need to apply greater pressure to Iran, which continues to support both Shiite and Sunni terrorist groups in Iraq, but that will be harder to do because Tehran is a more formidable adversary than Damascus.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Goldstein is less than impressed with John Edwards’ notion of “supporting the troops”:

What kind of cynical political beast would profess to all that