I watched the press conference and now I'm starting to read the report. Thanks for the handy links, TB.

Baker made it clear that they reject the "devolution" of Iraq into three semi-autonomous states, or as I put it, a "soft landing". That was the path that I saw as having the greatest probability of success at the least loss in lives and resources. It may still turn out that way if we fail to create a unitary Iraq state, and I worry that if we ignore the soft landing option we may lose the ability to influence events and the outcome will be a catastrophic uncontrolled collapse into three states. Ah well...

In reading the first part of the report, the assessment of the current situation, I'm struck by the degree to which power in Iraq, and indeed the Arab world, is personal rather than institutional. The civil war consists of strong charismatic religious leaders and their fighting forces struggling for dominance. It's about nothing other than power, and we shouldn't be puzzled that nobody's paying much attention to our imposed concepts such as "national reconciliation". It seems that reconciliation is an alien concept; you either win or you lose.

It's difficult for us Westerners to bridge the culture gap and understand that the fundamental basis of power in the Muslim world is not institutional as it's been for nearly two millenia in the West. European kings and emperors could negotiate with the Vatican and set up power-sharing arrangements that strengthened both secular and religious institutions, and as time went on, we've been able to contain the worst religious impulses in a long-standing institutional framework and gradually develop workable doctrines such as the separation of church and state.

Islam has no institutions with which to negotiate. Authority follows putative lines of descent from Mohammed (in delightful misunderstanding of genetics), always vested in individuals and rarely shared with institutions. The strongest governments in the history of that part of the world have been religious authorities first and secular powers second. Government = religion = authoritarian individual leaders.

Inevitably, the world's Muslim population is authoritarian-conservative to a degree found nowhere else. In imposing a radical new form of government on those people, we not only have to satisfy the lust for power among authoritarian leaders, we also have to account for the expectations of the people that proper governance comes from strong men who are the source of all security and stability; and the consequent anxiety caused by our system and its lack of comforting security and certainty.

I still must believe that a Western-style democracy in Iraq is the toughest sell possible. We have to overcome not just the consequences of the last century's pattern of European and American meddling in the Middle East, but 1,200 years of ingrained culture and deeply-held religious belief. We dare not forget that religion and politics are one-and-the-same in the Muslim world.

That's just some initial musing. I'm on page 32 of 160 of the report, and still ahead are the 79 recommendations. That's a lot of recommendations--maybe with a 79-Point Plan something will work.