All its best methods, all its clever tactics, all the treasure and blood that the United States has been willing to expend, cannot overcome the crippling ambivalence of occupiers who refuse to govern, and their principled and inevitable refusal to out-terrorize the insurgents, the necessary and sufficient condition of a tranquil occupation.

I stand by what I said. Mr. Luttwak is indeed calling for an occupation which governs. He makes quite a few other assumptions in his article, AFAIK, for instance, there has been no poll to determine whether Cubans or North Koreans support their governments, as bad as they may be, and as harsh as that may sound. You can't claim that the Spanish peasants or the Arabs can believe in something other than our style government and then assume anyone nowadays that doesn't have one doesn't like it. Personally, I do believe in our style of government, and its universality, ceteri paribus, but there are a whole host of other factors that can't be controlled.

You will notice that I was not predicting any success for Petraeus' plan, just saying it was the best plan for counterinsurgency. If Luttwak was saying that such a plan will not work now, I would agree with him. But he is saying it would never work without heavy-handed tactics, and that I don't agree with. It's too much like the reluctance to empire arguments we've all heard before.

And he teams it up with the different cultures demand different styles of government arguments. I agree with this at the implementation level, but I see it too often applied to believing that, say, "some cultures need a heavy hand to guide them," the argument used by the Reagan administration to support Marcos, just before Joe Biden delivered his now famous remark that "they must be smoking opium in the White House."

Which "Bushie" entered the arena? Hard to talk about lies and slander with comments like that lacing your prose.

The diagnostic procedures for degenerative disk disease, ruptured or bulging disks is usually an x-ray, a CT scan or an MRI. The first two take less than 20 minutes, the last takes a bit more. The last two are more conclusive than the first.

By all accounts, these "national security letters" have proven to be useful in tracking potential terror threats.

WSJ

Apparently, no proof that the NSLs were used for political purposes is enough to convince the WSJ that they were not used for political purposes.

But no proof that they were essential in tracking terror threats, as opposed to somebody told us they were " useful in tracking potential threats" is not enough to prove they aren't what they were supposed to be. 47,000 letters, and no documentable deterrence? How about proving that they have any use at all other than the political purposes?

I smell a large dose of the One Percent Doctrine.

By the way, I noticed that Hillary Clinton voted for the re-enactment of the Patriot Act in 2006. Would she have voted for it if she knew then what she knows now? How many times does she get to not "know enough then" before she is considered uninformed?

Definitely going to see some firings, maybe some indictments.

We need a new category for talking about what forces are causing perpetual turmoil in the world. We have "state actors", that was the original, coming out of World War II, and we have the term, especially since 2001, of "non-state actors", refering to Al Qaeda and others.

But there are these other groups.

In the U.S. the whole network of neo-cons and federalist society types that runs a lot of U.S. policy but never faced their own separate elections. I would classify Feith, Cheney, etc. but also Calabresi (author of the unitary executive theory, and a federalist society co-founder), Geoffrey Miller, Richard Perle, etc.

In Pakistan, there is the semi-state actor comprising the ISI and the A.Q.Khan people, who fund and support jihadi groups.

In Israel, it is becoming well known that the Olmert government opened a back channel to Syria after the war in Lebanon, and had nearly hammered out the framework of a deal until members of the military, and the Likud, derailed it. These same people apparently derail most peace initiatives there.

In Saudi Arabia, there are the Wah'habi forces that move money around, threaten the intelligence people under Turki, and actually operate with the auspices of the Saudi intelligence in other countries.

There is probably a much longer list, but these people seem all seem to fit the Hofstadter paranoid model that Glenn quoted.

If a state that is overwhelmed by non-state actors is called a failed state, what should we call one that is unable to do anything but carry out the wishes of these semi-state cabals?

Just a thought.