Almost two years ago, I wrote about the need to restore essential services (electricity and street level security) in Iraq as the key to providing the new Iraqi government with legitimacy -- see State Failure 101. The problem being that the majority of the US effort was dedicated to exactly the wrong set of priorities. As long as these essentials were ignored, I argued, the Iraqi state would continue to hollow out. This is exactly what occurred -- the open source insurgency has become very adept at disrupting electricity and militias have formed in almost every neighborhood to provide street level security.
Unsurprisingly, this week, both the US and Iraqi governments belatedly came around to this position -- both the US State Department and the new Iraqi government have both claimed electricity and militiasare now their top priority (from the NYTimes).Administration officials said that in his meeting with Ms. Rice, Mr. Maliki spoke of "re-establishing trust" among Iraqis by acting quickly to restore electrical power and root out the influence of militias in Iraq's police forces, which number about 135,000 nationwide.Unfortunately, the ability to make headway in these areas is going to be much, much tougher than two years ago. Pandora's box has been left open too long.