Where are we on Iraq?

John Robb surveys the current state of affairs in Iraq, and concludes that the decline in violence to 2005 levels has less to do with the surge or with a reinvigorated counterinsurgency strategy than it does with the fact that United States has co-opted radical elements in Western Iraq by offering them oodles of guns and money. Unfortunately, as he concludes, this means that the United States is now in the peculiar position of leading both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq.