ANALOGOUS TO GENTRIFICATION? Professor Drezner links to a Joshua Michael Marshall article about the neoconservative vision for the Middle East, and gets nervous. (For more about the neoconservative vision, read this.) The nervousness in Marshall's article and Drezner's post stems from the likelihood that some people, discontented with the course of events in Iraq, will make their discontent known in the jihadi style, which will give the neocons cause to seek regime-change-by-force in other neighboring countries. (There are some other thoughts on this topic in Marshall's weblog and at Kaus Files, should you wish to dig deeper.)

I claim no expertise in matters geopolitical, but wish to observe that the liberation of Iraq has a lot in common with urban gentrification. [Say what??] (Bear with me) People who get into urban gentrification like to find fancy old houses that they can buy on the cheap and fix up over the course of years. That often involves living in neighborhoods that are, well, trashed. From my experience with the phenomenon, such people do not like to be thought of as urban pioneers, as that image gives the suggestion that all was wilderness before they came. Think of Iraq as a fixer-upper in an old neighborhood (goes back to the Garden of Eden and Hammurabi and Scheherezade.) It's a fixer-upper with a lot of potential (some of the upper-middle-class Baghdad neighborhoods I saw in the 1991 Gulf War coverage had a Californian look to them, and the schools and agriculture and energy industries used to work well, although it has been a few years since the Baghdad Orient Express left for Istanbul.) One of the downsides of gentrification is that your work will attract the attention of thieves, and you might have to exercise some effort to persuade the dope peddlers and hookers to ply their trade elsewhere. (Substitute Islamofascists and Ba'athist nostalgics.) Thus, expect some trouble. The difficult test will be for the coalition to find the right mix of power and example to deal with the trouble (sometimes you have to send in the cops and take a few crack houses down, sometimes success in one neighborhood will lead to imitation in other neighborhoods.)