If you’re a subscriber to The Atlantic (and you ought to be) go check out Robert Kaplan’s latest “The Coming Normalcy” – an account of his recent trip to Iraq [PDF version free at Michael Yon’s].

I’ve updated and extended this post, and here are three quotes to get you started:

But by the time 1-25 left Mosul, a year later, mortar attacks alone had fallen from 300 a month to fewer than ten. Other forms of insurgent activity dropped to the point where international journalists no longer considered Mosul an important part of the ongoing Iraq story—a fact evidenced by their thin presence in the city. Meanwhile, the local police force was now back up to 9,000, and the number of police stations had expanded from five to twenty-four. More important, the number of intelligence tips called in by the local population had risen from essentially zero to some 400 per month.

The kind of chaos that 1-25 had alleviated in Mosul has been an abiding interest of mine. Twelve years ago in this magazine, I published an article, “The Coming Anarchy,” about the institutional collapse of Third World countries owing to ethnic and sectarian rivalries, demographic and environmental stresses, and the growing interrelationship between war and crime. Was it possible that Iraq, of all places, might offer some new ideas about how situations of widespread anarchy can be combated? It certainly was the case that, despite a continuing plague of suicide bombings, significant sections of the country were slowly recovering from large-scale violence, as well as from the effects of decades of brutal dictatorship. The very U.S. military that had helped to bring about the anarchy in Iraq was now worth studying as a way to end it, both here and elsewhere in the Third World.

You’ll note that – in opposition to the bleak view of his earlier piece (which was itself largely informed by the battle of Mogadishu) – Kaplan sees a path to success.He’s not completely happy, however.

It was surreal. The stability of Iraq will likely determine history’s judgment on President George W. Bush. And yet even in a newly secured area like this one, the administration has provided little money for the one factor essential to that stability: jobs. On a landscape flattened by anarchy in 2004, the American military has constructed a house of cards. Fortifying this fragile structure with wood and cement now will require more aid—in massive amounts, and of a type that even America’s increasingly civil affairs–oriented military cannot provide. This house of cards, flimsy as it is, constitutes a substantial achievement. But because Washington’s deeds do not match its rhetoric, even this fragile achievement might go for naught.

and, finally

A final impression of Iraq: one day I had gone with a group of American soldiers to the sprawling ruins of Hatra, a city that was founded after the fall of Nineveh, at the end of the seventh century B.C., and reached its peak in the second and third centuries A.D. Hatra lay in the desert southwest of Mosul, empty of other visitors, without even a guardrail or derelict ticket stand, as though awaiting rediscovery by some Victorian-era explorers. Indeed, the only sign of the twentieth century were the initials of Saddam Hussein, carved into bricks throughout the complex and looking like the marks of just one more tyrant from antiquity.

Hatra had flourished as a Silk Road nexus of trade and ideas; its mix of Assyrian, Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman styles set the stage for early Islamic architecture. The ruins encouraged me to think that Iraq’s best available future was as a similar east-west crossroads, in a Middle East of weak, decentralized states—states that would replace the tyrannical perversions of the modern nation-state that now exist, and are crumbling. In decades ahead, cities like Mosul and Aleppo would be oriented, as they were in the past, as much toward each other and toward cities in Turkey and Iran as toward their respective capitals of Baghdad and Damascus. Borders would obviously matter less, as old caravan routes flourished in different form. Something comparable has already begun in the Balkans, a far more developed part of the Ottoman Empire than Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, this transition would be longer, costlier, and messier. We are in for a very long haul. Except for the collapse of Turkey’s empire, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Iranian revolution, nothing and nobody in a century has so jolted the Middle East as has George W. Bush.

Normalcy can be taken in a number of ways; Iraq will move away from chaos and become normal because of our efforts; or else what we are doing in Iraq will become normal as we struggle against chaos elsewhere in the world. An interesting question to think about…but the simple fact of it is that what we are about will take time and persistence. The Iraqis think so, in Kaplan’s piece:

The offer of safety was backed up with the muscle of the dominant Jabouri tribe, which had decided to go with the Americans against the insurgents—but only after the American military had, month after month, demonstrated its resolve.

And the American troops say so as well:

“The media says there’s no strategy to win this war,” Turner observed. “There is; we’re doing it. But it’s slow, and it doesn’t make headlines like Abu Ghraib.”

Let’s go to the key point; the troops on the ground are doing what they are supposed to, and fairly well. The Administration is failing them because it can’t get reconstruction aid out – even in modest amounts – fast enough and over a wide enough territory to tip the political balance. WTF, President Bush? There is no excuse for this except complacency or cowardice; either they don’t really care what happens in Iraq or the Administration is so craven politically that it cannot stand up and demand what is needed to win.

Wretchard, at the Belmont Club comments on the article and says that we face a Manichean struggle between order and civilization and chaos:

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.

Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.

I think he’s partly right, but largely wrong.

The part that’s right is where the ungovernable chaos is either manipulated by greater powers (the Palestinians) or fueled by a rentier economy. Would Hugo Chavez matter if he didn’t have oil money to keep his economy awash and fund his adventures? Would Osama Bin Laden?

It’s the connection points between the anarchy and order that need to be managed, and those are few enough and identifiable enough that we can, in fact, manage them. We’re doing it in Iraq; we’re buying the time with our soldier’s sweat and blood to make change.

The question is – will we use the time? Or waste it?