I find it interesting, whether or not there will be a civil-war, that this Administration seems to be continuing to execute a plan conceived of before the invasion and seemingly heedless of what is happening on the ground.
Note that this is only what SEEMS to be the case to you, because the press has never really been interested in talking about what our strategies have actually been, or how things changed over time. And so the meme that Bush won't change course despite changing circumstances somehow got set in stone, and never really examined. But do you even remember who Bush put in charge of Iraq after the invasion? Hint: it wasn't Bremmer. Bremmer was brought in after the first guy wasn't accomplishing what Bush wanted done. I'm not saying that Bush didn't make some big screwups: I'm saying that this perception that he never changes course was false to begin with, though I'll agree he doesn't try hard to change that perception.
The insurgents/terrorists tactics and possibly even their goals are evolving.
Damn straight their goals are evolving, because their early goals have proven completely fruitless. Won't see much coverage of that, though. As to tactics, yes, their tactics have changed. So have ours. But again, the press is so woefully ignorant about military issues, and so uninterested in understanding them, that they aren't going to talk about how our tactics have changed too. Fortunately there's an upside to that: the insurgents get less information about how we operate.
But consider this too: in this kind of war, what tactics work best are often discovered by those actually doing the fighting. Now, who has a greater survival rate from engaging the enemy: the terrorists or US troops? The latter, by a huge margin. Who, then, is better positioned to accumulate such hard-earned experience? US troops. Who operates in an environment with open lines of communication across the force structure in order to propagate such information widely and thoroughly, and who has the resources to train with such new techniques to adapt them quickly and effectively? Again, US troops. When you talk about adapting, but you only talk about the enemy adapting, you're missing more than half the picture.
And finally, there are differences now compared to even a year ago which aren't so much due to any decision to change course but the ability to do things now which we simply could not do before. The shift from hunt and destroy missions to clear and hold missions in the Sunni triangle, for example, was made possible by the emergence of new Iraqi security forces, and those forces couldn't be conjured up instantly. They took time to develop. But now that they ARE a major factor in this war, they really are making a difference. And that was always a capability we'd just need to wait for. Similarly, we still have to wait before these units have a sufficient body of officers who have been tested and found effective before they can operate completely autonomously, because it takes longer to develop and test leadership skills than it does to train for combat.
The situation on the ground appears to be deteriorating (unless you believe in the media is hiding the real good news strategy),
How do you figure? I've been hearing THAT complaint for over two years now, and on occasion it's been true, but I see no signs of that being the case overall.
conditions for the population are abysmal,
And were abysmal to begin with. We just didn't see how bad things were (Thank you, CNN, for selling out your coverage to Saddam in order to maintain access which you couldn't even use to tell the truth). The question is not how bad things are, but what direction they're moving. And that direction, though it's been slower than I'd like, has still mostly been up.
the impetus to form a civil society seems to be on a precipice,
Again, this is one of those things I've been hearing critics complain about since the beginning. What's worse now?
