Joe,

You aren't seriously falling for Ralph Peters bullshit claims are you?

Honestly? After his last hilarious "editorial"?

For instance, would you seriously swallow his "fuzzy math" on electricity availability in Iraq?

I did think the whole "satellite shows Bagdad brighter than Damascus" line was a gem!

Personally I'd say Jim Henley has the man pegged.

But hey, maybe I just don't have the courage to believe.

Jim Henley's response is good and well-reasoned, especially on the issue of electricity. To have him quoting NRO's John Derbyshire is amusing, too, though I must say it's one of Derb's better columns. Brings up some points worth returning to.

Having said that, there are many parts of Peters' piece that do withstand scrutiny, and fit with data from elsewhere.

Claims of civil war being overblown. True. A better comparison would be the sectarian violence that occasionally erupts in India. Yet no-one ever claims that India is on the brink of civil war.

Peters says: "After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance." Peters should have been even more specific - most of the Shi'ites killing and burning were followers of Moqtada al-Sadr. Whom the US should have assassinated two years ago, and which may yet prove the greatest failure of the war.

Peters says: "On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. They've alienated Iraqis of every stripe." This fits with consistent reports from al-Anbar over the last several weeks. Guess assassinating the sheik of a leading local tribe wasn't a super-bright move in a tribal culture.

Peters cites: "Hatred of the U.S. military. If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of U.S. troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a U.S. Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned."

Tracks with reports I've seen even from sources like the NY Times, quoting Sunnis screaming about why weren't the Americans here when the riots happened, we trust them not the Shiites. The Times meant it as a criticism, of course. But it underscores Peters' point. And he IS in a direct position to see the reactions of Iraqi to our troops.

Peyters writes: "During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian.... The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success."

The former is pretty much true. Can't authoritatively peg the casualty figures, but they were the ones who went into the streets and IRaq did step back from the brink. And Peters is in a direct position to evaluate Iraqi army morale.

Peters writes: "Reconstruction efforts have failed. Just not true. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Iraqis have to do that. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The squalor has to be seen to be believed. But the hopeless now have hope."

As someone who has been following reconstruction perhaps a bit more closely than you, Peters' assessment is generally correct. Key pieces of infrastructure are significantly better than before, in many parts of the country. The Kurdish areas are, of course, especially flourishing - as Totten's reporting reminds us. But the improvement in Sadr City is equally real, and the assessment of massive neglect by Saddam's regime is true. That's the problem with infrastructure, a point AL makes here about the US in his "sewer socialism" posts.

There are still real political tensions, and the Parliamentary maneuverings are a high wire act (the Kurds' shift of support to the Sunni-Secular bloc is both paralyzing and heartening). There is ethnic tension, and Shi'ites are being cleansed out of Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad. Electricity and oil pipelines are the type of infrastructure most easy to disrupt, and both are likely to be ongoing problems for as long as Iran and Saudi Arabia wish to make them so, pretty much regardless of where Iraqis as a whole stand on the matter. The US Military needs a much better CONOPS (concept of operations) to address that, and it needs to be one the Iraqis can be involved in (i.e. not made up of $5 million a pop UAVs).

So there are a lot of challenges, and it's a dicey time. And Peters is wrong on some points. But he's also right on some.

As for "the courage to believe," Davebo, you've always had that and been quite tenacious about it. The content of that belief is very different from Peters' - but it is equally inflexible, and subject to the same sorts of biases.

This bit is also interesting, putting holes in Peters' thesis in some places and supporting it in others. It's a take from a couple of Iraqi journalists.

The electricity issue can be classified as nothing short of a debacle. To brag that electricity is marginally better than it was under Saddam after 4 years of reconstruction and hundreds of billions of dollars is rich. If there is one issue i'm at daggers with this administration with, it is this. The laissez faire attitude they have taken towards infastructure rebuilding has flat out cost us lives. We're the USA, if there is one thing we should be able to do remarkably it is to turn out the industrial and technological skills to complete a critical engineering project like this in a timely fashion. There was an article in the Atlantic I believe that really put the microscope on the projects. For instance trucking in fuel from Turkey to run power plants in Iraq because no-one has the authority to run a pipeline to the natural gas pipe literally across the street. That kind of thing is going on all over the country. There is simply no accountability, no command and control, and rife corruption. Individual projects run by competant contractors may work out, but they are drowned out by the beaurocratic nightmare around them. Im not kidding, this is a flat out boondoggle and its costing American and Iraqi lives.

I'd add to Mark's criticism generators that run on the kind of fuel Iraq doesn't produce. Which is why they have to truck stuff in from Turkey in the first place.

The electricity problem is definitely worth more follow up and understanding in terms of just what has happened, what the key issues are, etc.

Mark and heck even Davebo... if either of you wants to take a serious analytical crack at that which explains what has been attempted, the underlying issues, and the gaps, there's a Guest Blog in it. But, to use a very apropos phrase, this has been an issue with a lot of heat and not very much light. We'd want more of the light, and less of the heat. If the light is well done, people can draw their own conclusions.