HUGE EGO AND FRED KAGAN

Kagan, an AEI "scholar" and one of the designers of the Surge, was a guest on Hewitt's radio show. One exchange was revealing because it shows that we don't even have a reliable estimate of HOW MANY enemies are in Iraq:

HH: Well, one of the problems with seeing what is going on there is that the Pentagon won’t tell us how many of the bad guys are dead. Do you support that policy of non-disclosure of enemy casualties, Fred Kagan? Or should they change that?
FK: What would it tell you if they told you that, because the question of how many enemy is dead is only meaningful if you know how many enemy there were to start with.

Kagan admits to getting the view from the top:

FK: The morale, you have to understand, when I go to Iraq, I spend most of my time with officers rather than soldiers.

Kagan on the Iraqi central government:

FK: Well, this Iraqi government has a lot of problems, as people have pointed to all along. It was elected on the wrong basis, these people are, most of the people in the government are not really representative of mainstream developments in Iraq anyway, particularly the Sunni, because remember, the Sunni basically boycotted the election, selected these people. So there are all kinds of problems with the Iraqi government.

This is what Kagan thinks is a sign of hope:

And so I think the question is how can we find ways to harness reconciliation that’s going on at the grass roots, and turn that into something at the higher political level that would be more sustainable and more stable.

I'm not sure what grass roots reconciliation Kagan is referring to. We know the Sunni tribes in Anbar and elsewhere have no loyalty to the national government and we know that Baghdad is becoming more and more segregated along religious lines.