What comes next in the Middle East?

Also from Today's Washington Post:

The Pentagon's closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.

Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home." The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.

Of the three I think that the second is probably the way we will go. It is described in this way:

The group has devised a hybrid plan that combines part of the first option with the second one -- "Go Long" -- and calls for cutting the U.S. combat presence in favor of a long-term expansion of the training and advisory efforts. Under this mixture of options, which is gaining favor inside the military, the U.S. presence in Iraq, currently about 140,000 troops, would be boosted by 20,000 to 30,000 for a short period, the officials said.

The purpose of the temporary but notable increase, they said, would be twofold: To do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence, and also to signal to the Iraqi government and public that the shift to a "Go Long" option that aims to eventually cut the U.S. presence is not a disguised form of withdrawal.

Of course even this will not be enough if we do not do something to deal with the weakness of the Iraqi government. The fact is that it is looking more and more like the people who said that you can't bring democracy to an Arab/Muslim nation were correct.

It was an experiment that absolutely had to be tried. If Muslims cannot be civilized then they must be exterminated or utterly marganalized. While extermination is the most attractive from a purely emotional standpoint it is probably impractical given the sentiments of the age.

Marginalization will involve several components. One will be the disarming of the Muslim states. Another will be the the breakup of the Arab/Muslim nations into smaller states with logical borders. By logical borders I mean ethnically, religiously and tribally homogeneous countries. And finally placing the Middle East's oil under the control of a coalition of civilized nations led and controlled by the United States.

US control is vital because Europe has already proven itself hopelessly corrupt in their dealings with Saddam and China's totalitarian government doesn't qualify it as civilized. Russia's leadership can't seem to stop assassinating political opponents and critics and the Third World is, well, the Third World.

This leaves the United States, Eastern Europe, Japan, Ireland and India to administer the Middle East's oil reserves and ensure that petroleum is available on the world market at market prices. And to see to it that an appropriate percentage of the oil revenues are returned to the Arab world and used on things which will improve the quality of life there, instead of financing the global jihad.

Of course there is no chance that any of this will happen - right now. But humans have a great instinct for self preservation and tend to act in their own interests when they can. The necessity of finding a radical solution to the problem of radical Islam cannot be hidden from forever.