Stephen Biddle (late of the Army War College, now on the Council on Foreign Relations) writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that Iraq isn’t Vietnam.

…if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist “people’s war” of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.

Biddle argues that most thinking on Iraq miscategorizes the conflict. Strategies appropriate for countering a Maoist “people’e war” are potentially disasterous if applied to a communal civil war, due to the differences in the fundamental dynamics of these two different types of conflict.

Biddle argues that since sectarian violence is the greatest danger the US faces in Iraq, Iraqification is a very dangerous strategy:

…many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it.

Biddle offers is a refreshingly orthoginal perspective on the state/non-state debate that has been raging between the 4GWers and their critics. Sidestepping any claims about the global backdrop for the Iraq war (and whether or not it is characterized by an ephocal decline of state power), he focuses on the nature of civil wars and challenges posed by them. He seeks to describe what is, attempting to look hard and see well. It reminds me of Kent’s admonation to Lear to “see better” (I.i.160). This is the ultimate job of the analyst, and one at which Biddle consistently excels.