THINKING ABOUT EXIT STRATEGIES. Blogs for Industry appears to endorse the idea of declaring victory in Iraq and going home once there is a victory. Fruits and Votes offers a somewhat different victory condition. Both posts bring to mind memories of the American Civil War. Fruits and Votes sees this source of tribal antagonisms.

The elected majority leadership has little incentive to restrain its majoritarianism and its corresponding marginalization of the Sunnis as long as it has what looks like an open-ended commitment from the US.

Radical Republicans during the early stages of Reconstruction, anyone? On the other hand, is it too much of a stretch to draw parallels between Sunnis reclaiming some political power and the long, simmering insurgency that mutated into Jim Crow? (That insurgency, incidentally, despite the surrender terms agreed to by Lee and by Johnston, both of whom dreaded the idea of taking to the hills and resisiting.)

The analogy is not perfect. Emperor Maximilian, even with French help, along the southern border of the old Confederacy is not the same sort of challenge Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey bordering Iraq, each with a different interest in the resolution of the tribal antagonisms, pose to an over-the-horizon force maintained by the U.S.