Highly recommended. This is the smartest analysis I've seen.

Galbraith, another of JK Galbraith's sons, offers not only well-informed, biting criticism but thoughts on where to go from here: essentially, to gradually withdraw troops everywhere except perhaps in Kurdistan, where, he says, they are wanted, and could serve a useful purpose if the Sunni Arabs are unable to keep al qaeda and other anti-US terrorist groups from setting up a Taliban-like regime in the Sunni Triangle part of Iraq.

His reasoning is lucid and persuasive, based not only on his analytic decision to treat Iraq as the three largely autonomous regions it is but on a thorough understanding, gleaned from knowing most of the key players, of what their goals and degrees of power are, including what is negotiable and what is not.

I learned a lot from reading it, in particular about some of the history with which I am less familiar, and the situation on the ground in different parts of the nominal Iraq.

Galbraith was a longtime staffer for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well as a high-ranking official in the Clinton Administration State Department.

A few tidbits/observations:

*no shock to denizens here, I am sure, but Galbraith provides compelling evidence that, two months prior to the invastion, Bush was entirely ignorant of the Sunni/Shiite history of conflict. That helps explain quite a bit right there.

*he spends no time re-debating the merits of whether launching the war was a good idea, or something he would have chosen to do albeit in an entirely different way. He believes that about 80% of the Iraqi people--the Kurds and Shiites (I have to assume, not counting those who have died or been grievously wounded as a direct result of the war)--are better off as a result of the grotesquely misconceived and botched operation he dissects in the book. He believes that the US is considerably worse off.

*he has known Chalabi for a long time and has a far less damning view of the man than I got from reading the Chalabi-related parade of horrors as Josh was unmasking them on the mother ship. It appears to me that this is the case in part because Chalabi at least is an Arab secularist.

I'd recently read Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, recently and recommend that as excellent background. Not surprisingly, Nasr, a Shiite Iranian emigre, is upbeat about the prospects of greater Shiite influence in the Middle East.

In comparison to Galbreath's book, he portrays the Shiites as almost entirely victims of the Sunni-initiated insurgency, whereas Galbreath portrays the Shiites as having responded in kind to the various atrocities perpetrated against them, even though many of their public figures have publicly urged restraint. Galbreath believes the Shiites should be allowed to run the kind of state they want to in the South but is hardly overjoyed at this prospect. He does not, however, think it has to be a disaster for US interests to have a Shiite south with close ties to Iran.

*Galbreath clearly sees the Kurds as "the good guys" among the 3 factions, and a group the US should support consistently, as it has often supported the US.