My assessment of the battle for Basra has changed significantly. I still think that, in the subjunctive conditional tense, it was a reasonable piece of analysis – al-Maliki needed to do something[1] to start to establish his monopoly on violence within Iraq and I put material weight on his own seeming subjective assessment that he was politically and militarily strong enough to pull it off. But in the actual present tense, things are going the other way. (A disclaimer should certainly be appended at this point that this is all rather toward the punditry end of the spectrum rather than analysis so if that winds you up then skip it, but having picked that ball up I’m sort of committed to running with it).
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