I've not had the time to visit and / or fully read my favorite blogs of late. That said here are some items from just a few sites as well as a SWJ Daily News Roundup item that I thought warranted special attention here.

The Last Battle by Michael Gordon at The New York Times

... Over the previous few years, my own trips through Iraq had focused mostly on the US and Iraqi governments’ struggle with Sunni insurgents in battlegrounds like Mosul, Baquba, Hit and Arab Jabour. But the nature of the war has fundamentally changed. The American “surge,” together with a strategy that emphasized protecting civilians and engaging with Sunni tribesmen, weakened Sunni insurgents and jihadists. The bitter fighting between Shiites and Sunnis that turned Baghdad into a killing ground of car bombs, suicide attacks and mutilated corpses has quieted down. And now this sectarian struggle has been eclipsed by a growing tussle for power among the Shiites themselves. The competition involves Prime Minister Maliki and the Shiite religious parties (the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Maliki’s Dawa Party) that constitute the ruling hierarchy in Baghdad; Moktada al-Sadr’s weakened but still-popular political movement and its military wing, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army; and, increasingly, Shiite tribes.

The tug of war among the religious parties and the Shiite tribes has emerged as one of the most-significant but also least-understood aspects of Iraq’s political scene. It pits leaders from the Shiite core of Maliki’s coalition against outsiders looking for a way in. It is a struggle between party officials who spent the Saddam years in exile, mostly in Iran, and tribal leaders who endured his rule at home - and, on another level, a contest between urbanized Shiites, who lean more toward the religious parties and Sadr’s movement, and agrarian Iraqis, whose loyalties lie more in tribal society. Significantly, it is also a rivalry between Shiites who favor a government based on religious parties and those who have a more secular vision...

Much, much more - and discuss at Small Wars Council (Hat Tip MikeF).

Peacemaking is the Graduate Level of Strategic Discussion by Galrahn at Information Dissemination.

... When thinking about whether COIN is the graduate level of war, we ultimately decided that whether COIN is the graduate level of war or not is semantics, but what is relevant is that COIN represents the graduate level of strategic military discussions today.

The value of the COIN discussion is that its emphasis has required military thinkers to take a broader view of military strategy in a context outside of the Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, Fuller, etc.. wartime centric military strategy approaches. The COIN debate is part of a larger, and growing, military strategy debate towards peacemaking, or war prevention, and that is what makes it graduate level.

Why is this important? Because it has the effects of broadening the debates in other aspects of military strategy. An example would be the evolution of military strategy involving nuclear weapons from a broad position of MAD into a peace time strategy of escalation control and a wartime strategy of escalation dominance. I’m being general for the example, much intellectual rigor is still required in this and other schools of military strategy that connects the peacetime posture and wartime posture towards winning conclusions in military strategy....

RAND Terrorism Report Thrashes a Straw Man by Westhawk at his blog Westhawk.

... Seth Jones and Martin Libicki of RAND released a historical study of how terrorist movements end. Their examination of 648 terror groups that operated between 1968 and 2006 concluded that military force led to the end of terror groups in only seven percent of the cases. Political accommodation (43%) and police work (40%) were the most common techniques for ending terror campaigns.

The instant response of the mainstream media (for example, here) was to label the RAND report as an indictment of the Bush administration’s strategy against al Qaeda, a military campaign also known as The War on Terror.

Yet a closer examination of the RAND report shows it to be little more than easy smack-down of a straw man...

Messrs. Jones and Libicki must know that for at least two decades the FBI has made a major priority of expanding its liaison operations with foreign police services. And the RAND authors must also know about the Pentagon’s wide-ranging training and advisory efforts, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the Sahel, west Africa, southeast Asia, and Latin America. Rather than making themselves look foolish by calling for activities the US has already been doing for years, the authors might have critiqued these efforts instead...

Is the Islamic Army Going Back to the Mattresses? by Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark.

It hasn't gotten any attention that I've noticed amidst the furor over the provincial election law and Kirkuk, but a few days ago the Emir of the Islamic Army of Iraq announced a new offensive against American bases and troops. This campaign was authorized, according to the very brief statement, because Iraq's fate must not be determined by occupiers or their agents. This follows on the heels of the announcement a few weeks ago by Jaysh al-Mujahideen that it was leaving those two coalitions, of which it was a founding member along with the Islamic Army, due to their failure to produce any political results.

Why does this matter? Because the Islamic Army is the core of the coalition of 'nationalist-jihadist' insurgency factions which have expressed interest in joining the political process (the Reform and Jihad Front, the Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance) and is one of the key factions believed to have joined up with the Awakenings Councils / Sons of Iraq in force. Its public break with the Islamic State of Iraq (AQI) in April 2007 was probably the most important turning point in the transformation of the Sunni insurgency.

This could very well just be a propaganda move, an attempt to rebuild some credibility and draw attention to their military capability. It may amount to nothing more than an upswing in videos of exploding hummers. But that could backfire upon them, since if attacks do not in fact begin to pick up, it could prove seriously damaging to the Islamic Army's remaining credibility and devalue them as interlocutors. I've already seen some mocking posts on other forums asking, essentially, "where's the beef?" ...

The Wrong Place by Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club.

Two assertions about Iraq ought to be challenged or at least examined more closely. The first is the idea that security improvements in Iraq and al-Qaeda’s defeat had little if anything to do with the US effort. The second is the assertion that the “real” strategic center of gravity always should have been Afghanistan, because the proper object of the War is to “get bin Laden”.

Take the question of whether the growing success in Iraq had anything to do with US effort. Once violence in Iraq began to wane and al-Qaeda was clearly being defeated, the search to find a non-American explanation began in earnest. For a while it was fashionable to credit Moqtada al-Sadr’s “ceasefire” with improving conditions in Iraq...

A variant of the same narrative was that Iran had for reasons never fully explained, decided to let a defeated American army off the hook...

Still another line of argument was that the Anbar Awakening occurred prior to and independently of the Surge...

This discounts the effect of operations prior to the 20% increase in troop strength in Iraq that is commonly regarded as the start of the Surge. It discounts improvements in intelligence gathering, the creation of the Iraqi Army, the election of the Iraqi government, dismantling of the insurgency’s lines of communication of the insurgency, the change in tactics - a whole host of things - almost as if the Surge started from tabula rasa; a blank slate...

Rethinking Smith-Mundt: A Look Back at its Purpose by Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner.

Small Wars Journal just published my paper "Rethinking Smith-Mundt" in which I researched the historical record, scholarly books and articles and media reports surrounding the information activities portion of the US law commonly referred to as the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. After two years (1946-1947) of debates, testimony, amendments and a European fact finding trip, the Act was passed in January 1948. The result was legislation that institutionalized America's international engagement. It mandated controls and oversight to improve the quality of America's international broadcasting and as well as cultural and educational exchanges. To the modern reader, the concerns of the 80th Congress are remarkably similar to those of the 110th, right down to the public statements. However, the 80th Congress had deeper concerns than today's Congress and managed to deal with a far more comprehensive package than being considered today.

The purpose of "Rethinking Smith-Mundt" is to see through the haze of misunderstanding surrounding the Act and understand its original intentions. These intentions were not to prohibit the role of government in information engagement but rather to enhance its role, though in very proscribed ways. In fact, the media and the private sector recognized and supported the notion that engaging the world required assets beyond their capacity. The prohibition against domestic dissemination of news by the State Department's (and later the the United States Information Agency, created five years after Smith-Mundt) was not an outright prohibition but rather an allocation of responsibilities that let private sector media do what it did best and governmental media do what it did best. The wall between public and private was far more porous than we imagine today, something that only becomes clear when we re-examine the debates surrounding the formulation and passage of the Act. Such a re-examination also reveals why such prohibitions are no longer needed today...